Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  I told him that I liked to hear their stories. I tried to understand what it was like, a haunting by the past. I told him I never said anything about myself that wasn’t true.

  “You know, it’s likely you did suffer a trauma,” he said.

  I told him knowing yourself to be erased, knowing the return of yourself will erase you again, was trauma enough.

  He said, “I have something you should see.”

  His meetings are the same, but different. Instead of a basement, an institute conference room. Instead of doughnuts, Oreos. There are twelve subjects on the first Tuesday night, and all of them nod when Dr. Strauss asks if I can join. He tells them I’m one of them, and no one asks either of us to prove it.

  He doesn’t participate in the meeting. He sits in a corner and takes notes. They share with each other, trading memories that never happened.

  One of them is a college boy, blond and milk fed, looks like he should be playing lacrosse, getting frat drunk. He remembers vividly what his preschool teachers did to him. He remembers goat masks and blood drinking. He remembers the please-touch-me game, a ring of children in the woods. He remembers large hands guiding his small ones, touch here, touch how. He remembers lying in a ditch, three women looming over him like trees. A rain of dirt and hands. He dreams about these women. He writes them letters he will never send. He writes that he’s sorry, and tears blur the ink, and he throws them away. He says he knows it didn’t happen. He cannot make himself stop remembering that it did. He balls fists, he reddens with shame. He cries. “Why the fuck can’t I make myself stop?”

  Afterward, I ask Dr. Strauss why he wanted me to hear these stories, and he says he wanted me to understand my power. My superpower, he called it. “Your capacity to forget is the hand that shapes you—I wanted you to see how warped, how powerless the rest of us can be, shaped by incapacity. Unable to do anything but remember.”

  LIZZIE

  Once a week, Lizzie accompanied Wendy to get a physical. It seemed somewhat pointless, as there was nothing medically wrong with Wendy, as weeks of measurements and blood testing continued to confirm, but all data was good data. Wendy never resisted, only complained. “I think I hate doctors,” she said that morning.

  “Old or new?” This was their shorthand for whether an impulse felt like a remnant of the body’s former self or a new construction, derived from experience.

  “Both.”

  Lizzie made a note.

  They crossed into the neuropsych wing, where the young medical interns had better things to do and made sure everyone knew it. They rotated shifts through the Meadowlark Institute on a perplexing system, and Lizzie never remembered their names. Behind their backs, she and Wendy called them all Doogie Howser. Wendy was already gowned up, waiting for this week’s Doogie to fasten the blood pressure cuff, when someone knocked.

  “May I?” Strauss’s voice.

  The Doogie looked at Lizzie, Lizzie looked at Wendy, Wendy shrugged, The Doogie opened the door.

  “I thought I might observe. If you don’t mind, Wendy?”

  Wendy did not mind.

  This was unprecedented. Lizzie tried to breathe normally and told herself not to make anything of it. There was no reason to assume Strauss was here to see her, that he’d grown tired of keeping his distance, and was making an excuse to be near her, if only in a safe space, with ample witnesses. She could hope, but she could not let herself assume.

  Strauss took a seat beside Lizzie. It was the closest they’d been physically in nearly a week. They watched the exam. She had never been so conscious of the watching.

  This Doogie was older than the others, bearded with a silver stud in his left ear. He had Wendy settle herself on the exam table. He slipped a hand inside her gown, pressed stethoscope to skin, and it must have been cold, because she flinched. No one made conversation.

  “Deep breath,” he said. Wendy gave him one.

  He peered into her ears, up her nose, down her throat. He shined light at her pupils. Then Wendy lay down, before being asked, and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. The Doogie opened her gown. Palpated her abdomen. Palpated one breast, then the other.

  Lizzie also hated doctors. She resented slipping her feet into something called stirrups, and the expectation to smile and answer questions about her weekend while rigid metallic instruments were inserted. Then the pinch of the pap. She hated doctors as she had hated her grandmother’s doctors and her father’s doctors. Doctors told you what was wrong with you and why it couldn’t be fixed. Doctors told you when it was time to give up. Doctors told you I can’t tell you what to do here. Doctors imposed responsibility but would not take it. They told you that maybe, probably, statistically, but really, who could say for sure.

  “Her blood pressure’s a little elevated,” the Doogie said as Wendy ducked behind a curtain to reclothe herself. “Nothing to worry about.”

  There was nothing physically wrong with her. This continued, week after week, to be true. Lizzie wondered now, if the scans had turned up a tumor squatting on the hippocampus, whether Wendy would have refused its removal. A tumor holding the body hostage, and why not. Would it be any easier to give yourself up if you knew you were simply an excisable lump of mutated cells?

  “Did you ever think about how there’s no word for it?” Wendy had asked once. “Memory—we have a noun for the thing you remember. But there’s no noun for the things you forget.”

  Lizzie suggested this was because an absence was not actually a thing.

  “Except I am,” Wendy said. “You people never let me forget that.”

  After the appointment, Wendy retreated to her room. Which left Lizzie alone with Strauss, at least for the duration of the walk to his office. She searched for something to say that would make him linger, make him stop looking at her the way he did now, wary. For one month after her father’s death, Lizzie had given herself over to a counselor’s haphazard weekly care, and he had asked insistently, How does it feel? Lizzie would say, I think, and he would stop her. Don’t think. Feel. Listen to your body. Locate the pain, lungs belly groin heart. My pain is amorphous and omnipresent, she’d thought. Her pain was divine. After the fourth session, she’d decided she could not risk feeling anything more, and never went back. Now, when Strauss was this close to her, she felt. A tightness across her chest. A stricture, a fluttering. She pictured wings rubber-banded together, twitching against elastic, jonesing for flight.

  “My mother wants to invite you over for dinner,” she said, which was both true and a joke. The joke fell flat.

  “Why would she want to do that?”

  “It’s possible I’ve been avoiding her and blaming work. She claims she wants to meet the man responsible.”

  “You seem dubious.”

  At least they were talking again, she thought.

  “She just wants an excuse to meet you. You’re a man, and a semifamous one.”

  “You’re not a parent,” he said, and the part of her that felt like a child wanted to spit in his face. His bushy brows quirked. “Semi-famous?”

  At least he was smiling. Then, disaster.

  “What night did she suggest?”

  “What?”

  “For dinner.”

  “No, I didn’t mean you should actually take her up on it.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  This was an excellent question, and Lizzie preferred not to look too hard at the answer.

  “So you don’t want me to?” Strauss said.

  “You want to?” Lizzie said.

  “You let me know what night would be good. I don’t think I should pass up the chance to meet the woman responsible for Elizabeth Epstein.”

  “She’s not responsible for me.”

  What were they doing, the two of them? Lizzie did not understand.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” he said. “We move on.”

  He left her alone to wonder who had made the mistake, and why the feeling in her body was now limp relief. />
  * * *

  Wendy wasn’t in her room. Lizzie found her in Anderson’s room instead. It was increasingly these days the most likely place. He was at the piano, Wendy on the bed. Lizzie settled beside her. Anderson was squinting at a spread of sheet music, picking his way slowly and discordantly through the notes.

  “It’s Bach,” Wendy said. “Or it’s supposed to be. ‘Unfinished Fugue.’ ”

  “Appropriate,” Lizzie whispered.

  Wendy responded in her regular voice. “He doesn’t mind people talking while he plays. He likes it, don’t you, Anderson?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  Anderson unsettled her. Talking to him made Lizzie feel erased.

  The music stopped. Anderson’s fingers hovered over the keys. He looked up, started in surprise at the sight of two strange women sitting on his bed. “Hello.”

  “Do you know Bach’s ‘Unfinished Fugue’?” Wendy asked. “Could you play us that?”

  “I don’t know it, I’m sorry.”

  “Isn’t that the sheet music for it right there?”

  “Oh! It is, yes. I could give it a try, if you’d like.”

  The childlike trust in strangers, the eagerness to please, these were symptoms of his hippocampal damage. But it made sense to Lizzie: Why not be joyous, if you believed you were only a few minutes away from the rest of your life?

  He began again, picking through the notes as if he’d never seen them before. The theory was that repetition would embed the fingering in his implicit memory—that he could remember even without knowing he remembered.

  “It’s an unfinished fugue,” Wendy said quietly.

  “So I gathered.”

  “No, it’s actually unfinished. They used to think Bach just died in the middle of writing it. But Dr. Strauss thinks he left it unfinished on purpose, as a statement of the impossibility of completeness.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “We come here sometimes, to listen. He loves Bach.”

  “I know this.”

  “Dr. Strauss says it’s a miscarriage of justice to the ears and to poor, dead Bach, the way he’s murdering the music like this. But he also says it’s like watching a slow-motion miracle.”

  “I didn’t know you and Dr. Strauss spent so much time together.” Lizzie was careful to modulate her voice to clarify just how little she cared.

  “Well…”

  The music stopped, again. Anderson flinched at their presence, again. Wendy asked him to play. It was no better.

  “I didn’t tell you because I knew what you’d think,” Wendy said. “But I started going to his group sessions.”

  “The recovered memory thing?” It was one of Strauss’s pet projects, a longitudinal study on the victims of the recovered memory craze.

  “Yeah. They think I’m one of them.”

  “Why?” She meant, why would Strauss let her lie and intrude on what was implicitly understood to be a protected space, but also why Wendy would bother. And why both of them would keep it from Lizzie. She didn’t like this, the idea of them having secrets from her, with each other.

  Wendy admitted this was not her first trespass. She had hit AA, NA, survivor groups, PTSD support groups. “You wouldn’t believe how many there are, once you start looking.”

  “But why?”

  “I like their stories.” She blushed. “Dr. Strauss said I should come to his group because that’s one where I actually belong, sort of. They all remember something that didn’t happen. I remember a nothing that didn’t happen. So.”

  “You said you knew what I’d think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what do I think?”

  “That I’m a liar.”

  She was, in fact, thinking Wendy must be a good liar, better than Lizzie had lately given her credit for.

  “And you think it’s wrong,” Wendy said.

  “Apparently Dr. Strauss disagrees.”

  “You’re a better person than he is. Or—no, that’s not quite it.”

  The fugue looped on and on.

  “You care more about being a better person. That’s it. You care about people thinking you’re better.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “I saw him kiss you,” Wendy said.

  The music stopped. Anderson noticed them all over again.

  “Can we not talk about this right now?”

  “Who cares if he hears?” Wendy said. “If he doesn’t remember, it didn’t happen, right? Anderson, Lizzie and Dr. Strauss were necking on a street corner, isn’t that shocking?”

  “Would you stop?”

  Anderson furrowed. “Do I know a Dr. Strauss?”

  “He gave you this nice piano. Also, he’s married. What do you think of that?”

  Lizzie stood up, unsteady, unsure how to regain control.

  “So, are you sleeping together?”

  “Of course not!”

  “It is a very nice piano.” Anderson ran his hands along the maple wood. “Do you think I could play it?”

  “Please,” Lizzie said. “Loudly.”

  “Okay, you haven’t slept with him, but you want to.”

  Admitting it would be an unfolding, limbs forced fetal for too long finally set free.

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting,” Wendy said.

  “You have an MRI appointment. We should go.”

  Wendy thanked Anderson for the performance, but he’d already crossed the next threshold, no longer remembered it. “Did I play well?”

  “Magnificently.” Wendy cupped his face and kissed him, tongue visibly sliding past her lips, then his.

  Anderson was half man, half coping mechanism. The latter must have decided that if a strange woman was kissing him, she had good reason to, because he pulled her closer, sighed.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Lizzie said belatedly.

  Wendy let go. “What?”

  “You can’t do that to him.”

  “He won’t even remember.”

  “That’s the fucking point.”

  “He shouldn’t be allowed to have what he wants?”

  “He can’t know what he wants.”

  “Says you. You think if his body can learn the piano, it can’t learn this?”

  “Oh, hello!” Anderson said, noticing them again.

  “He can’t tell on me, obviously,” Wendy said. “And you won’t.” She sounded very sure.

  * * *

  Lizzie decided she would not tell. She would not worry about being passive-aggressively blackmailed by her own research subject. She would not stalk Strauss, finding more feeble reasons to position herself where she would be seen. She would not feel his approach on some animal level, forgetting in his presence what her body was supposed to do, every motion requiring conscious thought—hand reaches for pencil fingers wrap and tighten hand lifts pencil places pencil in bag face frowns legs lift and fall and carry away. She would not stare at the empty space where the Augustine photograph had hung before Strauss moved it into her subject’s room and wonder what other special favors the subject had asked for and received. She would not feel jealous of her subject. She would not trade shifts to sleep more nights at the Meadowlark because she wanted to possess his building in its dark, to sleep in its grip. She would not return to their corridor in the middle of the night because she woke up wet from a dream of what she might find there. She would not linger before the photographs of inmates past because she liked to imagine herself sliding into an ice bath, cold fire burning out unwanted desires. She would not imagine a version of herself gone wild, gown torn, feet bare, a self swaddled in straitjacket and dragged down dingy corridor, strapped to metal slab. She would not imagine Strauss’s palm on her forehead to quiet her screams. Him her keeper, her the kept. She would not feel her heart quicken and something clench at the thought of this other Strauss unwrapping her other self like a candy bar, extricating her limbs from straitjacket, her body from gown, securing leather restraints
around bare wrists and ankles and waist and neck, asking if she wanted him to take away her pain, not that it mattered anymore what she wanted, if she wanted. She would not imagine him forcing her rigid jaw open, jamming a wooden dowel between her teeth, and she would not gasp at the thought of him tightening the restraints until they bit flesh, drew blood, and she could not move or speak or scream, but could feel his hands on her and the hot breath of his whispered promise, that this would make her feel better, but first it would hurt. She would not. She was not that kind of woman. She refused to be.

  WENDY

  Conversations with Anderson

  Do you mind if I come in?

  You’re welcome. Everyone’s welcome here.

  You look familiar. Do we know each other?

  I don’t think so. In fact, I’m certain not. I would remember a face like yours.

  How is my face?

  Lovely. The face of someone kind.

  I don’t think so.

  * * *

  I thought it would be good practice, watching myself be forgotten. I thought, if I could experience it in real time and see that it was painless, I could be less afraid. Less angry.

  * * *

  Hello, can I come in?

  Welcome, everyone’s welcome here.

  Have we met before?

  I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure not. I would remember your face, I’m sure of that.

  What is it, about my face?

  It’s… it seems very sad. Except your eyes. They’re—oh!

  Did that hurt?

  Yes. It hurt very much.

  Remember that.

  * * *

  Dr. Strauss told me that some infinities are greater than others. There is an infinity of even numbers, but the infinity of all whole numbers is twice as large. If the opposite of infinity is nothingness, then maybe some nothings are greater than others, too. Which is to say, I have no power in this place. Anderson has no power in this place. But between the two of us, I still have more than him.