Gwen looked shockingly old. I considered sending her a message, but did not. Her latest post announced her recent return from a romantic anniversary trip to the Bahamas. The pictures: Gwen and Andy dancing in the surf, Gwen and Andy swimming with a pig. Gwen and Andy, mugging for a poorly focused selfie, the caption 20 years and still going strong. I logged out.
V
ALICE
In the dream, there is always a moment of denial. Hands creep across swollen stomach, fondle stretched flesh, press newly penile nub of belly button, sense deep within an alien churn. She says, no, no, I can’t be, but undeniably, yes, now, she is. She feels colonized. She feels ruined. Always, she thinks, How did I forget that I did not want this? She wakes needing to pee. This ritual discovery of disaster averted is her only unqualified happiness, now that her mother is gone.
The week after she lost her virginity, Alice took three pregnancy tests, just in case. When they all came up negative, she considered texting the sperm dispenser, who had entered his number into her phone as Emergency Services. She did not.
To alleviate the guilt of temptation, she called Daniel. She missed Daniel. He asked if she was still glad she came. He hadn’t wanted her to—like her father, he’d urged Alice to accept, move on, heal. Daniel believed in smart choices, healthy caution, and this was part of what she’d loved about him. He was worried she might ruin her scholarship, her year, her future.
“You know your mom would want you to take care of yourself right now,” he said.
She told him she had no idea what her mother would want, and that was the whole point.
“I just don’t see why it has to matter so much, that she kept a secret from before you were born.”
“Because it does.” Because it wasn’t a secret, it was a time bomb. Because Alice’s mother had been someone else without her memory, that was becoming obvious. Wendy Doe was a stranger, and that made Karen Clark part stranger. And because Alice took after her mother, everyone said so. If her mother’s psyche had a hidden fault line, who was to say that Alice didn’t have the same fracture?
“Can we not have this same argument again?” she said.
“Fine.”
“How’d your history test go?” she said.
“It was physics. And it was shitty. I think I failed.”
“You always think that,” she said. “Then you always ace it.”
“Oh good, I guess I don’t have to worry.” There was a slight edge to his voice. But he wasn’t mad. Daniel never got mad. Add it to the list of qualities she’d thought she loved. “How’s your dad?”
“Honestly? I have no idea.”
Her father always told Alice he was fine, described days at the office and dinners with friends, but it was hard to believe him, especially in this house, every room suffused with the widow’s longing.
There was a long silence.
“Alice, when are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. I have to stay here until I find some answers.”
“And what if there aren’t any? What if there’s nothing there to find?”
“I’m not ready to consider that as an option,” she said.
“Yeah, but what if? You just stay forever?”
“I said—”
“You can’t run away, Alice. Eventually you’re going to have to face the fact that—”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about this.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Anyway. I should go,” he said.
“Yeah. Okay.”
But he didn’t go. He was waiting, hoping she would say it first. She was the one who’d said it first, the very first time, and she was the one who’d started saying it routinely, because the echo was reassuring.
He gave up waiting. “I love you.”
She was the one who’d stopped saying it at all, after her mother left. He’d brought this up only once. They were watching The Simpsons, as they were always watching The Simpsons that summer, because it made him happy and she no longer had the energy to. Upstairs, his father would be baking bread or stirring soup; his mother would be editing copy for the next morning’s broadcast, his little brothers wrestling with such fierce, thumping joy it made the ceiling shake. Daniel’s family was a stop-action movie of Kodak moments. His parents were always kissing each other. They hugged everyone, even Alice, who was too polite to refuse. They were all easy with the world—as if to be yourself required not conscious and continuous self-construction, hesitation, readjustment, but simply giving way to the gravity of existence. That night, he sat with his feet on his mother’s coffee table; she lay with her head in his lap, eyes closed, waiting for another day to end. Daniel asked why she never said she loved him anymore, and she said, please don’t ask me to feel something. Two weeks later they left for their respective campuses. He thought she was afraid, that to feel anything was to risk feeling everything. That wasn’t it. She simply didn’t: feel. That was gone.
She wanted to say it now—could almost make herself want him, want to tell him that she’d let a stranger inside her, that she was sorry and not, that she’d done it because of loving him and in spite of it and for reasons having nothing to do with him and for no reason at all, that she hadn’t thought of him while the stranger was on her, in her, wet and heavy and gasping, but she thought of him when she was alone, that she pretended her hands were his hands, that last night, writhing on the widow’s ugly sheets, she had mashed her face in the pillow and groaned his name. It was like a break in the clouds, a shaft of gray light—then the wind shifted, the sky closed again, and she said goodbye and hung up.
* * *
The widow had given her a stack of tape recordings of interviews with her mother. Alice listened to them only in private, lights off, shades closed, her mother’s unmotherlike voice alone with her in the dark.
“Of course it’s occurred to me,” Wendy Doe said on the tape. “Imagine you woke up in a public place, your back and shoulders covered in bruises. Imagine you had no fucking idea where they came from, no idea who you were, no idea of anything. Wouldn’t you assume something terrible had happened? You think I needed you people to tell me this was probably caused by trauma? What else is there?”
“It doesn’t bother you, not knowing?” That was the young Elizabeth, whom Wendy Doe called Lizzie.
“What makes you think it doesn’t bother me?”
“You seem very adamantly not to want to know.”
“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other. Does it bother me to know something might have happened to me, or to this body, before it belonged to me? Of course it fucking bothers me. Do I want to remember what it was? Would you?”
A pause. “Definitely.”
Laughter. “You know where the word trauma comes from?”
“Do you?” Young Elizabeth was kind of patronizing, Alice thought.
“Dr. Strauss told me. Trauma is ancient Greek, for wound. So you tell me. If I stabbed you right now, that would be a trauma, right?”
“Okay, sure.”
“Would you rather feel the pain, get stitched up, wait for it to heal, keep the scar forever? Or would you rather just snap your fingers and have it disappear like it never happened?” Wendy Doe said.
“I guess I’d rather have the scar—I think the worst things that have ever happened to me make me who I am.”
Another laugh, a bitter one. “Maybe that’s because nothing bad has ever happened to you.”
“I think we’re done for the day.” A crackling silence followed. Alice turned off the tape.
Just before leaving for college, Alice had read an interview with the actress who played her favorite character on her mother’s soap. She was almost exactly Alice’s age, and had been on the show since she was a child. Alice had grown up with her, watched her parents die flamboyantly and—thanks to a few miraculous returns from the grave—repeatedly (helicopter crash, stabbing, earthquake, building collapse, stabbing again). Alice h
ad watched the girl defeat cancer, fend off a gang rape, survive a gunshot that left her wheelchair-bound from spring sweeps through Christmas, had watched her love and lose and lose again. In the interview, the actress revealed the toll enacting this trauma had taken on her body, which only knew what it had done, not why. Her body, she said, remembered the tears and the screams and the battery and the longing; it bore the full weight of an imagined life. Forgetting something, Alice thought, didn’t erase it.
The idea of trauma had occurred to Alice, too, of course. The causal link between trauma and memory loss seemed to be the only thing everyone agreed on. Alice had forced herself to think through what might have happened to her mother, and when. Bruises all over her back—Alice hadn’t known that part. The things that could happen to a woman on a bus, or on the street, or—Alice hated herself for even indulging this option, if only to dismiss it—in her own home. They were infinite, but didn’t they all boil down to the same thing? Brutality done to the body, brutally enough that the mind fled. Karen Clark was a strong woman. If something had broken her, it must have been something even stronger.
You’re just like your mother: This was the steady refrain of Alice’s life. She’d resented this, for all the obvious reasons, but was also pleased by it. But she could not have been much like this version of her mother, because Alice couldn’t imagine not wanting to know. Was this what her mother had expected Alice would find a way to do now, let her wound go numb until she forgot it—and her mother—ever existed? Alice had nothing in common with a person who could do that.
Elizabeth knocked on the door. Alice liked this about her, that the widow didn’t assume ownership implied access. Alice invited her in.
“My stepdaughter’s in the neighborhood and just invited me to a last-minute dinner. I was wondering if you’d like to join us?”
It felt like a pity invite, and Alice wondered whether she’d been listening from outside the door.
“Unlimited garlic breadsticks,” the widow added.
“I guess it has been a long time since I’ve had a family dinner. Even if it is with someone else’s family.”
The widow laughed, its bitter edge sounding more like Wendy Doe.
“What did I say?” Alice asked.
“Something you definitely shouldn’t say in front of Nina.”
“What?”
“That she and I are a family.”
* * *
Table for three at the Macaroni Grill. The daughter, Nina, arrived late, sweaty from biking to the restaurant, in cargo pants and a T-shirt that read Have You Punched a Nazi Today? Nina was the kind of girl Alice’s mother would have deemed an undesirable influence, her catch-all term for the blunter slovenly, slutty, irresponsible, unsafe. Silver studs climbed her left ear from lobe to tip, a chain link tattoo cuffed her bicep, and blue streaks threaded her spiky black hair. Their mall-banged cheerleader waitress didn’t even pretend not to stare.
The widow seemed terrified of her stepdaughter—flinched from Nina’s arrival hug, then overcompensated by squeezing her for too long, complimenting her spiky hair with a tentative pat, as if appreciating a well-groomed but formerly feral pit bull. Alice now understood her presence here was not imposition but favor. Stepmother and daughter needed a buffer.
Nina asked the widow about her book: a nonstarter. The widow asked Nina about her internship and law school prospects: the former unpaid, the latter on hold. This left a single safe route: both turned to Alice, asked after college major, future plans, childhood in the Rockies, small talk skirting family and past. They ate their bottomless bowls of pasta, dipped garlic breadsticks in garlic oil.
“I remember your mother, you know,” Nina said as the widow picked up the check.
“You couldn’t possibly,” the widow said. “You were too young.”
“And yet. Dad would bring her on these picnics we had sometimes, by that old graveyard behind the main building. I remember, because she taught me how to make etchings from the gravestones.”
“I did that with her, too,” Alice said. “Cemetery etchings.”
Nina asked Alice what she’d thought of the Meadowlark, and Alice tried to be diplomatic, leaning hard on the impressive technology, avoiding mention of imagined straitjackets and angry ghosts. “Your father must have been really impressive,” she said.
Nina rolled her eyes. “If you say so. You ask me, that place is totally creepy. Horror movie material. Though maybe I’m biased, given that it’s also the place my father cheated on my mother and murdered my childhood. No offense, Elizabeth.”
The widow glanced at Alice, clearly chagrinned, as if she’d expected Alice to actually buy the story that grad student and professor had hooked up only after the demise of the latter’s marriage.
“Your father tried very hard to repair his marriage,” the widow told Nina. “He and your mother had a lot of problems, and the way things ended up, it wasn’t—”
“Please don’t. You shouldn’t have to defend him to me.”
“No, I shouldn’t, because he was a good man.”
“We all know what he was,” Nina said. “I knew back then, and I was in kindergarten. You think you were the first mistress he got to babysit for me?”
The widow’s face drained like an unclogged sink. It occurred to Alice: that was what she’d thought.
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You didn’t know him like—”
“Like you did?” Nina said. “I’d think you might be in a good position to know how much a man like that keeps from his wife.”
Elizabeth stood abruptly and excused herself to the bathroom, mumbling something about meeting them outside the restaurant, then she was gone.
“Fuck,” Nina said. “Why do I do that?”
Alice followed her into the night. They waited on the curb, minutes passed, the widow did not appear.
“You think she’s okay in there?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think one of us should, like, go check on her?”
Nina laughed. “You don’t know her very well yet, do you?”
They waited.
“So how’s the house?” Nina said.
“Okay, I guess? It’s nice.” Alice wondered what Nina thought of a stranger staying in what had once been her childhood bedroom.
“I keep hoping she’ll sell it. I can’t even imagine how fucking depressing it must be for her.”
It almost sounded like actual concern. “You two don’t seem very… close.”
“She thinks I hate her.”
“Do you?”
“It’s complicated. Whatever. She’s got this idea that I need to think my dad was some kind of saint, or, I don’t know, maybe she thinks he was some kind of saint.”
“What was he?”
Nina shrugged. “According to my mother? A toxic man-whore. You ask Elizabeth and—well, you see how that one goes.”
“What if I ask you?”
“My father was…” Nina looked away. “I don’t know. She’s right about that at least. I never really got to know him. It seemed like maybe, after I graduated, things were going to be different, but then…”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said, then winced. “Actually, forget that. I hate when people say that.”
“Totally. It’s like, what are you apologizing for, you didn’t kill him.”
It felt comfortable talking to Nina about this, like they were in the same club, and Alice resisted it: there was no club. She didn’t believe in psychic crap, auras, vibrations in the ether, but still, wouldn’t some part of her know if her mother was dead?
“You really remember my mother?”
“I only remember the cemetery thing. She was just another adult to me, you know? I wasn’t paying attention. I am sorry about that.”
Alice hated it, the idea of her other mother mothering this other child.
“Why do you care so much anyway?” Nina asked.
“About what she was like when she
was here?”
“Yeah, it was so long ago, and she was having, like, some kind of mental episode, right? Why does it matter?”
This was the same question she’d begged Daniel to stop asking, but Nina was a stranger. Honesty seemed easier.
“If it didn’t matter, why would everyone lie about it for so long?” Telling that kind of lie, sustaining it for Alice’s whole life, contradicted everything she’d thought she knew about her mother. “The more I find out, the more it seems like she was this totally different person. And it’s like, is that who she really was deep down? Or is that who she gave herself permission to turn into when she escaped everybody she ever knew?”
“You almost sound jealous.”
“I feel like she designed me to these precise specifications,” Alice said. “She made me exactly the daughter she wanted me to be—and now I find out she got to turn herself into this whole other person? It’s hard to explain, but it feels…”
“Unfair?”
“Maybe.”
“Look, I’m going to take off before Elizabeth shows up, it’s probably easier that way—but can I tell you something you might not want to hear?”
Alice indicated her permission.
“You asked what kind of man I thought my father was? The real answer is I never looked too hard. That’s his shit, and my mother’s. I decided it wasn’t going to be mine. You’re allowed to do that, you know? You don’t have to be who your parents ‘designed’ you to be. You get to be anyone.”
“Easy to say, but it’s not like I can just wake up and decide to be a different person.”
“Why not?”
Alice was still considering the question when the widow finally emerged, unsurprised that Nina was gone. Her makeup had all washed away. Alice imagined her crying in the bathroom, splashing cold water on her cheeks, preparing her face to face the world, and as they drove back to the house, Alice wondered who Elizabeth would be if she could be someone else.
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