Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  To be young, she decided, is to believe love dissolves the boundaries of self. Yours is mine and mine is ours. This was what she’d told herself about Natalie and Emma and Daniel, what she’d imagined might be true for the whole of them, the loose group of friends, enemies, and nonentities with whom she’d endured seventeen years of educational efforts, even Brian Fletcher, who’d once picked his nose and smeared the results on her forehead, even Marcus Boone, the one non-Daniel boy she’d kissed, who had found her alone in a storage closet beside the junior high art room, pushed her against the wall, stuck his tongue in her mouth and his hand up her skirt, then let go, never mentioned it again, never knew she’d spent the rest of the day inside the closet, not sure if she should cry. She had believed they were all one—that to whatever degree they knew themselves, they knew each other. That if she loved the people she loved hard enough, she could guard against ever being alone. After her mother left, Alice knew the truth. There was Alice, and there was everyone else. This could not belong to them, and if this didn’t, nothing else could.

  Nights, Alice lay awake. Thought, slow and deliberate, the words: Your mother is gone. She could never quite make herself believe it. On the fifth day of your mother is gone, she and her father drove to Alice’s grandparents’ house. Each gave her a stiff hug. As always, Alice tried not to stare at the photos of Ethan, who would have been her uncle if he’d lived, and whom she knew only as the angelic blond boy of the portraits and the monster who’d haunted her childhood nightmares. No one talked about him. Alice wondered whether the same would happen to her mother: a few creepy photos added to the wall, then case closed, forever. Except that Ethan was dead, and her mother was coming back. Five days in, she was still certain of this.

  “Honey, can you go downstairs and visit with Aunt Debra a bit, while the grown-ups talk?” her father said. She searched herself for the expected resentment, found only submission. To be a child, sent away while problems were dispatched: if only.

  “So, Mom’s missing,” Alice told her aunt.

  Debra made some noises that might have been Alice’s name or might have been her mother’s. Saliva drizzled from the slack side of her mouth. Her eyes were the same green as Alice’s. Uncle Ethan had died at ten; Aunt Debra had made it to eighteen before disaster struck. Alice grew up assuming her family was cursed.

  “I’m not worried,” she said.

  Debra stared.

  “I mean, obviously, I’m worried. But it’s not like she got kidnapped or something. She just walked out. But she’ll come back. She wouldn’t actually leave. For good, I mean. So you don’t have to worry or anything.”

  The wall behind Debra’s bed was decorated with the postcards she’d sent her big sister during her year delinquenting across the country—the Golden Gate Bridge, the Alamo, the Statue of Liberty, some diner in the middle of a desert, a baby lynx dangling from a tree in Yellowstone National Park. It had always seemed cruel to Alice, trapping Debra here with the reminder of how desperately she’d wanted to get away.

  The older Alice got, the more insistently her mother wielded Debra’s story as cautionary tale. This was what happened when you dropped out of high school, when you slept with a Phish groupie and let him drive you away, when you got dumped in a strange city and instead of crawling home, moved into a squat with a bunch of wannabe artists, when you took drugs from whoever offered them and you OD’d on the floor of some South Street warehouse like a junkie. This was what happened when you behaved irresponsibly, broke the rules, even one rule, because sometimes one was all it took—you fell down a deep, dark well of self-destruction and ultimately, you broke your parents’ hearts. Alice’s mother testified with the authority of an eyewitness: she’d gone to Philadelphia, that first time, to bring her baby sister home. Had done so, but only after witnessing the overdose, riding with Debra in the ambulance, sitting beside her every day in the hospital and then for the long drive in the specially equipped ambulette her parents had hired, with their remaining crumbs of retirement savings, to bring their baby girl home for good.

  When Alice was younger and Debra was stronger, the basement had been their shared sanctuary. Debra would play dolls, finger paint, call upstairs when the apple juice ran low. It felt sometimes like they’d started out the same age, one growing up and one growing down.

  “They’re not telling me something, and I’m not even sure I want to know what.”

  Debra smelled like expired milk and Alice wanted to scream.

  “I’m probably not even supposed to be telling you this. But you have no fucking idea what I’m saying, do you.”

  Picking up on her tone, Debra started to tremble.

  “Calm down, Aunt Debra, it’s okay. Please.”

  She wanted, wanted, wanted to scream.

  When she was younger, she’d hated Debra a little for being the one her mother loved best. Later, she’d hated her mother for turning Debra into a future that Alice was meant to fear. The lesson landed: She never looked at a joint or a pill without seeing Debra and abstaining. She never looked at Debra without seeing herself.

  “Okay. Good. See? I’m chill. You’re chill.”

  These days, Debra wore a diaper, and Alice could smell now that she’d used it.

  Alice wanted to be the kind of person who could love her. But even more Alice wanted a real aunt, who would tell her bitchy family gossip, slip her condoms and nonjudgmental advice, say, Your mother is coming home, then take Alice in her arms until it came true.

  * * *

  They drove home from her grandparents’ house in silence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “For what?” He put a hand on hers, squeezed lightly, did not take his eyes off the road, which made it easier to pretend that when he smiled and said they would be okay, together, whatever happened, he actually believed it and she did, too.

  Alice took after her mother, everyone said so. Their shared height, sharp angles, dishwater brown hair with a slightly greasy sheen could all be ascribed to genetic lottery, but everything else was conscious choice. Her mother, however prim and retiring she endeavored to be, was a presence. She had standards, impossible to meet. Alice resented this as much as she respected it, measured every decision against her mother’s principles—acted sometimes to comply and sometimes to rebel, but never considered acting without her mother’s approval as a metric. She loved her mother, but the ways she lived that love were complicated, and shifted by the day. Sometimes she thought the complication was what gave it value. Alice loved her father, of course she did, but there was nothing complicated about it, or him. In their family’s ongoing war of great powers, he was less Switzerland than Luxembourg, a nonentity.

  Alice’s mother was a committed believer: in cleanliness, in order, in rules, in etiquette, in rigorous honesty. Alice was committed to gaining her mother’s respect, even as she chafed, ever more vocally, against the way of life her mother had ordained. Her father sometimes seemed committed only to checking species off his birding wish list, tuning out wife and daughter, the better to focus on his search for a calliope hummingbird or a Gunnison sage grouse. Her mother found birding incomprehensibly dull, so the year Alice turned twelve and had woken to the pleasure of irritating her mother, she’d pretend to adopt her father’s calling as her own. He’d been so grateful for her company in the woods that she never had the heart to revoke the enthusiasm. It wasn’t so bad, following him through the trees. She liked the silence, the obligatory dissolution. Every other context demanded Alice construct a presentable version of herself, a face to meet the faces that you meet, as that irritating poem had it. In the woods, padding carefully behind her father’s silent steps, listening for the crackle of twigs, gaze fixed at the sky, there was the opposite demand: to be not-Alice, not-anyone, only a transparent eyeball, observing without interference. She wondered sometimes if her father’s attachment to his birds sprang from the same source, but never would have asked. It was like the woods, between them. Quiet, easy
, no need for a face.

  They were not equipped for this, the kind of silence weighed down by the necessity to break it. On Alice’s tenth birthday, when she’d officially lived as long as her uncle Ethan, her grandmother showed her a scrapbook of Ethan’s finger paintings, attendance certificates, report cards. The glue holding it together had long since evaporated, and as Alice turned the pages, one memory after another fell off, drifted to the floor. That’s how she felt now, with her father, the glue between them all dried up.

  They made dinner together, still without speaking. She sensed he was stalling. She thought maybe she wanted him to.

  “Alice.” They sat across from each other at the kitchen table. He paradiddled his fingers against the edge of his plate. “Alice, I have to tell you.”

  She wanted to say, Whatever it is, don’t.

  “Alice.”

  She hated the sound of her name almost as much as its derivation. It was an insipid book, and diving down holes in pursuit of rabbits ran counter to everything she’d been taught. What kind of parents named their daughter after a girl they would raise her not to be?

  “The thing about your mother is that she’s done this before,” he said.

  * * *

  The thing about her mother is, once upon a time, she lost her mind. Couldn’t remember who she was. Ran away to a city that had only ever brought her misery, lived under another name for six months—then woke up to find her memories returned, as abruptly as they’d departed. She remembered nothing of what had happened during the months she’d been gone. It was as if she’d gone to sleep one night and woke up half a year later, as if none of it had ever happened.

  So we decided to pretend she had, he told her. To pretend it never happened.

  This was all before you were born, he told her. There was no reason to tell you.

  Except that no one knew why the memory loss had happened in the first place. And if you didn’t know why something had happened, there was no way to prevent it from happening again.

  Except that her mother had prepared Alice for every possibility except the possibility she would one day forget Alice’s existence.

  Except that her mother demanded absolute honesty and claimed that this was what she offered in return; except that Alice had molded herself to her mother’s specifications, and now it turned out her mother might be a person she didn’t know—must be, because the mother that Alice knew would never have walked out the door.

  * * *

  It was easy enough to find online records of her mother’s past, once she knew to look. The Internet gave her the city, the names of the Meadowlark Institute and the doctor, but that was all. It was already more than her father wanted her to know, and he asked her to stop asking questions. He’d never asked any himself, he said.

  “It’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. He’d believed it was possible, in those first few days, that the fugue had descended again. But the nineties were dead, and with them the likelihood an amnesiac woman could just disappear. This was the age of surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology, smartphones and DNA databases. When the police closed their case, Alice’s father had bought a tombstone, installed it over an empty grave.

  “Drop it,” he kept telling her. “Why dredge up unhappy memories?” He was angry. He was always angry now, always trying to pretend otherwise, and someone who didn’t know him well might have been persuaded, as anger only deepened her father’s silence. His emotional lake, always ripple-free, had turned to glass. Mirrored glass, Alice thought. Impenetrable. She reminded herself often that he wasn’t angry at her. Alice’s father said she wasn’t allowed to think her mother didn’t love her, nor was she allowed to imagine her mother had ever been a someone else. He said Alice was allowed to be mad at him as much as she wanted, but not at her mother. Never at her mother. You only think you’re mad, he told her. You’re grieving. We’re grieving.

  She was, unlike him, not mad. She was not grieving. She’d studied up on fugues enough to know that a person who had one could be expected to have more. Her mother was someone other than who Alice had thought, but she was not dead.

  Alice suggested deferring college for the semester. She said she couldn’t leave him all alone. He told her he wouldn’t let her throw away her future for him, that this was the choice Alice’s mother had made for Debra, and look where that got all of them. He watched her pack, drove her to the airport, hugged her goodbye, and on the plane she tried not to wonder if what he felt, driving home to a silent house, no obligation to perform his emotions or monitor hers, was relief.

  Relief was supposed to be her turf. Freshman year: freedom. She was no longer hostage to her mother’s rules. She could drink and smoke and fuck as she liked, no one to root through her underwear drawer for contraband, no one to read her diary and annotate, in unabashed red pen, the parts disapproved of. But drinking and smoking and fucking would have felt like an admission that her mother was gone. And whoever her mother had been, Alice was still the daughter her mother had raised her to be. So when her roommates got a guy who worked in the dining hall to make them fake IDs, she declined. When game night shifted from Trivial Pursuit to strip Twister, she pled homework and retreated. On a sweltering September night, she did not join the group skinny-dipping expedition, and when the boy in her chemistry lab who’d invited her, a water polo player with exactly the body that implied, suggested a rain check for just the two of them, she said a polite no, thank you, and switched to a different lab period. Not because of Daniel, whose imagination would have balked at the prospect of imperfect loyalty in his perfect girlfriend, but because of her mother, who would not approve.

  When her philosophy professor described the theory of the panopticon, the surveilled man become principle of his own subjection, she understood. And, slouched over her tiny desk, blinking against the fluorescents as the professor droned and the class napped, she understood this, too, for the first time: no one was watching.

  She was her mother’s daughter. Even once the decision was made, she deliberated: not just how to go, but where. She rejected the fantasy that she could play Nancy Drew and ferret out her mother; she refused to impose herself, unwanted, on her father’s life; she determined, finally, to go back to the beginning, to track down the woman who had never existed, to meet the people who’d known her, to understand who she was, what she had wanted, what had happened to her then, whether what had happened to her then had dictated what had happened to Alice all these years later.

  It wasn’t running away. Her mother was the one who ran away. Alice was running toward. Fugue, she had learned, came from the Latin fuga, which sometimes meant flight, sometimes meant the act of fleeing. That was what psychological fugueurs did, they fled. It turned out the musical fugue had the same root. Melodies took flight, chased one another, the second voice hopelessly behind the first, never surrendering to the futility of catching up. Fine, then: Alice would be a fugueur, like her mother, but essentially different. Her mother ran. Alice would chase.

  WENDY

  You

  You were a wife. You were careful not to make him angry. You made him angry anyway. You made him do it. You apologized. You tried harder. You made him do it again. You hid your bruises. You lied. You had enough. You left everything behind including yourself. Or maybe you went too far, you fought back. There was shouting and blood. You let yourself be consumed.

  Or maybe.

  You were a mother, but you didn’t want to be. You wanted it dead before it was born. Now it was here, crying, biting, needing you with a need that had no bottom. You imagined how easy it would be to make the crying stop. Leaving your baby would be unforgivable, but you left anyway, or you stayed, and did something unforgivable. You made yourself disappear. No one left to forgive.

  Or you escaped from a cult. Or you escaped from a bomb blast. Or you escaped from a mugger, from a basement, from a car trunk, from a dumpster, from a plane crash, from a prison, from a suburb, from a terrorist, from a cr
ime scene, from a burning building, from a dead end.

  Or you were fine. Privileged, even. Nothing to complain about. You were the worried well. You were exhausted. You were afraid of being selfish, or you were selfish. You were tired of being yourself. You wanted to be someone else, anyone else, so you walked out. You kept walking. You made yourself forget.

  Stay forgotten.

  ALICE

  Alice preferred her Cheerios drowned in milk. Especially once she’d eaten enough of them that the bowl was more milk than cereal, and the remaining Os were left bobbing helplessly in a dairy sea. “Do you think it was another fugue?” she asked Elizabeth. “Like, something set her off and it happened again?”

  The widow frowned, then apologized, which seemed to be her default stance. There was no way of knowing, she said.

  “Yeah. I figured.” There was one lone Cheerio stranded at sea; Alice dunked it, then mashed it against the bottom of her bowl. She had been awake most of the night and spent too much of it online, scanning a government database of missing people—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. She’d discovered NamUS over the summer after googling “how do I find a missing person.” Many of the resulting sites paired cheerful illustrations with suggestions like “inquire at nearby hospitals and morgues.” Every site ultimately funneled her to NamUS. Alice had made an entry for her mother, but had little faith it would generate any leads. Instead, she spent her time scanning the database’s list of “unclaimed persons.” Most were elderly or mentally ill, but if Alice’s mother washed up somewhere without her memory, she would eventually land on this shore. The database had a third section, “unidentified bodies”: skeletal remains found in the Montana woods, bleached bones found in the Arizona desert, unsettlingly vague “partial limbs” recovered from a dumpster in New Jersey. Before the database, she’d almost enjoyed imagining her mother’s alternate lives—a mountainside in Nepal, an Indonesian beach, a bustling village in India. Now her vision was crowded with bones. The site offered free forensic odontology and fingerprinting, which meant if she ever stumbled over a skeleton, Alice could determine whether it belonged to her. The site also offered the services of an investigator, but the woman Alice talked to had only been interested in playing social worker, pointing her toward local groups that might help her accept her mother’s supposed suicide. This was a service for which she had no need. According to NamUS, six hundred thousand people went missing every year; four thousand unidentified bodies were recovered. Alice wanted to know where were the rest?