Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  “Why not? You’re beautiful. And with the moonlight on your skin—”

  She indicated her clothing-swathed body. “No skin. You keep aiming that thing at me and there won’t ever be again.”

  He offered her the camera. “You want? I’m not shy—” His jeans were still unbuttoned, easily tugged down, as he demonstrated. She waved him off.

  “No one wants a picture of that.”

  He grinned. “Not the feedback I’ve gotten in the past.” But he put the camera down, and she relaxed. Let him nip at her nose, play his fingers across her nipples, and down, and down. “What’s with you and getting your picture taken?”

  “Nothing. What’s with you and taking them?”

  “I like seeing people’s stories—you find the one moment that cracks open the door, and you can imagine a whole life.”

  He told her about the photography class he’d taken in high school, the one class he never showed up to drunk, the teacher who’d given him his first camera, and—not unconnected to his arousal to the art, he acknowledged, but not strictly causal, either—an occasional blow job in the school darkroom. He told her that the way he felt with a camera in his hands was the way he felt with vodka in his bloodstream, or the closest he was going to get, that he could almost escape from his own head, use the lens to flee into someone else’s story, and, envious, Alice let his words slide into noise. She thought about the weight of him, heavier than she was used to. She thought about how Daniel touched her body like he knew he wasn’t supposed to. When Zach wanted her to turn over, he turned her over, and just like that she’d tasted dirt and he was hoisting her up by the stomach, onto hands and knees, thrusting. It didn’t feel like she was his subject to command—more like his object, to do with as he pleased. It wasn’t that she liked this better, it was that he recused her from having to like at all. There was a moment, his hand on her breast, guiding her upright, straddling him, his other hand stroking the liminal zone where his body offered itself to hers, that she went rigid with a sensation entirely unlike the pleasure she’d learned to visit on herself, entirely unlike pleasure at all, and she forgot to feel ashamed.

  Z and A ate cold, gummy pizza. Alice told him a story of a girl she might have been, if she’d been the daughter of Wendy Doe. She grew up with a single mother, she said. An addict: pills and drugs, also men. Then Alice told him her mother was dead.

  Z told her he had his first hangover in seventh grade. That drinking made him feel less lonely. He told her that when he was a kid, he’d been afraid of cemeteries.

  “How’d you even know about this place anyway?”

  “My mom brought me here once when I was a kid,” she said. “Back when it was still haunted.”

  The cemetery wasn’t much of one. Alice skimmed her phone’s flashlight along the crooked stones. They looked centuries old, weedy and weather-beaten. The dates belied the decay: 1947, 1942, 1959—all of them women, all of them young.

  As a child, Alice had ridden her bike through the local cemetery almost without seeing it. By high school, the cemetery had taken on a different resonance. A cemetery at night rewarded trespass. To party boldly with the dead proved age and youth all at once. It was the safest kind of rebellion—trespass against people who couldn’t fight back. Alice thought about graves differently now. Maybe there were two kinds of people in the world, she thought, the kind who laughed at ghosts, and the kind who thought about coffins, and who was inside them, and who was not.

  Some of the women had first names, but no last names. Some just had descriptions: loving daughter, loving mother. One read, loved and missed, which seemed twice unlikely.

  “It’s kind of sad,” Zach said, aiming his lens at a grave. “Rotting away all these years, no one even remembering they’re here.”

  “Everyone dies like they lived, right?”

  She could tell he thought that was profound.

  “So how do you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You know. Live.”

  “Dangerously.”

  He didn’t laugh. “How did she die? Your mom?”

  “She killed herself.” It was the first lie she thought of.

  “Shit.”

  It is a lie, she reminded herself.

  “You must hate her.”

  “That’s kind of a fucked-up thing to say, don’t you think?”

  “But you must really fucking hate her.”

  “She hung herself. From the ceiling fan. I found the body. I guess it didn’t occur to her that would fuck me up for life. That I would never stop seeing her body just turning and turning.”

  “Wait, the ceiling fan was on? Why would she—?”

  “She could have done it when I was a kid. But she waited. You think I’m supposed to be grateful?”

  He pressed his palm to hers, measuring their fingers against each other. “I never told anyone in those meetings why I started drinking. Or, why I started drinking too much, I guess.” He studied their fingertips, which were almost the same length. “You want to know?”

  “Fuck no.” She kissed him to shut him up, as she’d seen on TV.

  Mission accomplished, she thought, as they unzipped what they’d just zipped, tangled together what they’d just pulled apart; she’d turned herself into someone else. Because the Alice she’d been would not be here. That Alice would have been too prudent and too loyal, would have felt like Daniel’s love gave him claim to her body, would have built of that love a wall to keep trespassers out. That Alice would not betray someone she loved. There were two kinds of people in the world, she thought, and Alice could not be the kind who did that. So this girl, naked and moaning in this boy’s arms, she must have become someone else.

  VI

  WENDY

  The things I learn at night

  I am the shadow who haunts the shadows. I listen for ghosts. I choose to be the kind of person who believes in ghosts. It makes sense to me, that the dead would agitate against being forgotten.

  I prefer not to sleep.

  On the second floor, I found the office where Lizzie stores her notes. At night, I read what she says about me. She doubts I am a whole person. She believes I have a “semiconstructed self.” She says my emotional reactions are “contingent and post-hoc.” I am “presenting” a self but do not yet consist of one.

  She also prefers not to sleep, at least here. I see her lurking in the spaces that belong to him. I see her kiss her forehead to his office door.

  She doesn’t know how often he sleeps in that office. Sometimes, at night, he and I walk the darkness together. He asks me what I think of her, whether she’s smart, whether she’s attractive. I tell him I’ve seen the picture of his wife, and she’s no more attractive than that.

  “It’s easy to be moralistic when you’ve never been in love,” he says.

  “How do you know I’ve never?”

  “Not the woman you were before. I’m talking about you. Virginal in every sense of the word.”

  At night he doesn’t talk like a scientist.

  I ask if he thinks I’m attractive, and if so, more or less than Lizzie.

  “Feeling a little competitive, are we?”

  “What if I told you I was in love with you? Stockholm syndrome.”

  “You’re not a prisoner. I’m not your kidnapper.”

  “But what if?” The building is shut down; we’re alone. I point out that no one could stop him from doing anything he wanted. He asks if this is an invitation.

  “I’m wondering what you would do, if you had permission.”

  “What makes you think I need permission?” He smiles to show it’s a joke. He takes my hand. He touches my face, and says, like it’s a gift, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful. If I were a less ethical person, we might be having a different conversation.”

  I’m so used to it here, men moving my body where they want it to go, that by the time it occurs to me I don’t want to be touched, not in the dark and not by him, he’s already le
t go.

  LIZZIE

  She needed Strauss to believe that nothing had changed. Nothing, she told herself, had changed. Except. She woke up with the thought of him, whether she would see him that day, whether they would be alone, whether this would be a day he would descend with lunch or for a moonlit walk through empty corridors. She thought about what she could wear that he might like, though he had given no indication he liked anything; she applied makeup with care, wore shoes that accentuated her calves, tried and failed to master the curling iron Gwen had given her years before. She scoured journal articles; she brainstormed future experiments; she shadowed Wendy, recorded, took notes, imagined tunneling into the mysteries of consciousness. She did all of this because she was genuinely curious, diligent, ambitious, because it was her job and her calling, but also because she wanted to impress. She felt like a cat slaughtering birds and mice, dropping them at her owner’s feet, waiting for praise. She waited eagerly for opportunities to praise him. She discovered with horror her longing to be an audience, the ease with which she gave herself over to awe. Only as she was falling asleep did she allow herself to fully indulge fantasy. She’d never been able to conjure the faces of hypothetical lovers, but her other senses were more pliable, eager to satisfy any longing. Her hands in his hair. His mouth at her ear. His whispered confession, that he fantasized about her, too, that he could not have her, but wanted her nonetheless. She avoided the other fellows more than she had before, because conversation with them inevitably found its way to him, and she couldn’t be sure of controlling her face, her voice, her posture, any of the myriad autonomic signals that might give her away. Relief from thinking about him or trying not to think about him came only from the physical reality of him, and this saved her from humiliation, from behavior of which he might have taken note, because to be with him meant she could relax back into herself. Her body was a muscle that unclenched only in his presence.

  Embarrassed, she did not tell Gwen. She did not tell Wendy, either, but she was tempted.

  “New plan,” she’d said the day after she and Strauss agreed on the new direction. “I’m taking your advice. We’re going to stop focusing on what you don’t have, study what you do.”

  “And what do I have?”

  “That’s the question, right?”

  Wendy laughed, Lizzie laughed, and the sound leveled them. This would be partnership, subject and object entangled, fates aligned.

  “You,” Lizzie said. “We’ll study you, whoever’s left now that the past is gone. Which we can’t study with tests.” Laboratory hypotheticals carried no stakes, induced no consequences. An amnesiac could reason herself out of a maze just as well as a rat—the key question, the new question, was whether she would bother. Whether she preferred prison to freedom, effort to stasis, what future she desired in the absence of a past. “Are you in?”

  “So you’re going to, what, observe me? In my natural habitat?”

  “In whatever habitat you want.”

  “No more tests—”

  “Fewer tests,” Lizzie clarified.

  “And more trips to the mall.”

  “With fewer crimes and misdemeanors, preferably.”

  “So if I ignore the fact that you’re recording everything I say and using it to figure out whether I’m an actual person or not, it’ll just be the two of us hanging out, like we’re friends?”

  “Do you want a friend?”

  Wendy considered this, shrugged. “How would I know?”

  Lizzie made a mental note. The forging of relationships without the experience of an emotional bond; the desire, or lack thereof, for connection, in the absence of love or loss. If you had never had a father to lose, a mother to fall short, if you had never wanted someone you could not have, would you want nothing or everything?

  “Do I have a choice?” Wendy asked.

  * * *

  This was how she filled the time without him: she shadowed Wendy Doe. They went to the movies; they watched TV. Wendy explored the grounds, traced the names on graves, made snow angels; Lizzie took notes. Wendy talked with Anderson; Lizzie took notes. Wendy tried an exercise class, tried a cooking class, tried sushi; Lizzie took notes. Wendy took up smoking, as a habit; Lizzie took her to task, lectured her on her responsibility to the body and its safety, then acquiesced, lit one of her own, took notes.

  In November, Strauss gave a colloquium for the fellows and postdocs, a glimpse into the project he’d not yet made public but that he hoped would be the centerpiece of his career. She knew this because he had asked her to read the paper before he delivered it; he had wanted her opinion on his words, his work. He was nervous, and he had confessed this to her. Watching him at the podium, confident and charming, she felt like she knew a secret.

  “William James tells us, ‘Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced the occurrence.’ My challenge for good old Will, for all of you: Must I? Says who? Imagine,” he said, and looked down at the paper so rarely it seemed less like he was reading than that he was inventing possibilities on the fly. “Imagine if you could experience your worst memories as if they happened to someone else. Imagine the freedom—from sorrow, from trauma, from pain—if we could divorce memory from emotion, drain the past of its power to shadow the present.”

  The fellows, seated beside her, were rapt. Even Lizzie, who’d heard the rehearsal, who knew what was coming, felt slightly spellbound as Strauss shifted gears from his current research to blue sky, stratosphere. He was convinced, he said, that memory consolidation—the process of the brain turning experience into long-term memory, encoding the detail and emotions that would be remembered, streamlining away that which would be forgotten—persisted over time. That memories were altered and reconsolidated with each retrieval. In other words, a memory could be changed by the remembering of it. Imagine, Strauss said, that this alteration could be controlled. Imagine the future, a modulation of amygdaloid participation, the severing of memory from self, that we could remember a better past than we’d lived, or remember our pain as if it had been suffered by a stranger, a story once heard that could do no harm.

  After the applause, Lizzie lingered, hoping Strauss might catch her eye, beckon her over, and he did. He wanted to introduce her to someone, he said. The elegant blonde standing beside him with ballerina posture and a body to match extended her hand. “My wife,” Strauss said to Lizzie. “My protégée,” to the wife. A tiny child peered sullenly from behind the woman’s legs.

  “And the little munchkin here is Nina,” the wife said. The girl whined something about wanting munchkins, preferably chocolate. No one acknowledged it. “So you’re the one he can’t stop talking about.” The wife’s pearl-pink lips pulled back to reveal perfect teeth. She had 90 percent of a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, Lizzie knew. She also had hair like Barbie. Long, lithe limbs that she extended with grace. Obviously, but understatedly, expensive clothing—curve-hugging cashmere that invited touch. Strauss talked about his wife sometimes, but always in the context of the domestic—errands she nagged him to run, food she nagged him to eat, supplies she nagged him to buy for the child. Lizzie had pictured a mother, like her mother, someone nebulously older and much further down the road toward frump. A woman who, in an imagined side-by-side comparison, would be older than Lizzie, saggier, baggier, less fun and more work, a woman who—though she knew very well it was beneath her to think this way and added it to the list of ways she’d become unrecognizable to herself—would make Lizzie feel young, superior, even, unprecedentedly, sexy. This woman simply made Lizzie feel like a child. No one who wanted a woman like this could ever want a Lizzie.

  The wife was going on about all the wonderful things Strauss had said about her, how much promise she showed, how bright her future could be, how delightful it was to work by her side, and Lizzie smiled, resisted the urge to curtsy, waited until she was back in her office to cry. He talked about her to
his wife. He had no reason not to. There was no mutual longing, no forbidden temptation. There was nothing between them that had gone beyond the bounds of appropriate. And this was the way she wanted it. She wanted him to be a man who would never cheat on his wife with a student, who would be so far from tempted the thought had never occurred. This was the double bind: wanting Lizzie would disqualify him as a man worth having Lizzie. Her fantasies were only fantasies, her crush harmless. Healthy even, she told herself—long-awaited evidence she was capable of heedless wanting, the depth of need her actual relationships had never managed to plumb. Maybe she had unlocked some wellspring of feeling that would eventually be channeled toward a more appropriate target. In the meantime, though, it was hard not to feel delusional, and pathetic, and alone.

  The next day at lunch, she was shy with him. He was standoffish, too. She assumed she’d given herself away. He stood to leave. Rubbed his hands through his curls. “I don’t think I can stand one more meal inside these walls,” he said. “Tomorrow I might go out.” She told herself this, too, was fine, and she shrugged, so he would know it. It was time to recalibrate, remember she was here to learn. Learning did not necessitate shared Szechuan noodles. She should not have been relieved when he added that—if she wanted to—she should come along.

  He drove. The last time she’d been in his car he was a stranger. She had not thought much then about the closed ecosystem, the intimacy of shared breath. There was a Dr. Seuss book in the back seat, a Cheerio embedded in the floor mat. They listened to Bach. He explained musical fugues to her. Think of the fugue’s subject like a memory, he suggested. The ultimate question of the fugue, he said, is the ultimate question, period. How much can something change before it becomes something else.

  She made various noises to indicate she understood.

  He said, “You know what Aldous Huxley said about Bach, of course. ‘The only music that holds up under mescaline.’ ”