Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  * * *

  Hello, would you like some company?

  Always. Welcome.

  Have we met before, do you think?

  Have we? I’m sure I’d remember your face.

  Does it seem sad to you?

  Why? Are you sad?

  I am nothing, Anderson. I’m somebody’s bad dream. How could I be sad about that?

  You don’t feel like a dream to me.

  How do I make you feel, Anderson? Right now.

  Warm. Safe. How do I make you feel?

  Like a person.

  * * *

  Lizzie thinks I’m fearless, free to do what I want, because I live without consequence. She misunderstands. I can act like nothing matters, because I know what does and does not. What matters is that I am allowed to stay here, because here is the only place I have to go. Which means what matters is satisfying Dr. Strauss. I’m free only within these parameters: do what is necessary to maintain his interest, do nothing that would alienate it. Everything I do has consequence. Except here, with Anderson. After seven minutes, whatever happens here never happened at all.

  * * *

  I’m not sure you should do that.

  It feels good, doesn’t it?

  Yes, but. Well. I.

  Maybe you deserve to feel good. Maybe you’ve done something to deserve it.

  What could I have done?

  You don’t remember?

  Things are a little foggy sometimes.

  So you should trust me. Do you trust me?

  I don’t even know you. Which is why I’m not sure you should be… oh.

  Let’s pretend I do know you, just for now. That we deserve to make ourselves happy. Would that be all right?

  … yes.

  LIZZIE

  The worst part of dinner was not her mother’s dress, funereal black with a hooker hemline. Nor was it the anecdotes of awkward adolescence, bolstered by the supporting evidence—crimped hair, bedazzled denim, roller disco diva dance, bat mitzvah crinoline—of photographic record. Nor was it even the fact of the dinner itself, her mother simpering, Lizzie glowering, Strauss in her father’s chair, picking gamely at his treif chop. The worst part was the discovery that Strauss and Lizzie’s mother had grown up in the same pocket of Germantown, and the subsequent fusillade of shared memories. He was more than a decade younger, but still. Their synagogue youth groups co-organized dances; their high schools rivaled each other in football and chess. They had both, on a dare, scarfed enough White Castle to puke. Strauss remembered Lizzie’s uncle from a JCC fund-raiser. His broken arm had been casted by the same orthopedist who treated Lizzie’s mother’s broken ankle; both had, at one time or another, hopped the fence at the Philmont Country Club. Strauss bought his rugelach from the bakery where Lizzie’s grandmother did the books and Lizzie’s mother spent summer vacations behind the counter.

  “I would have remembered you,” Strauss said. “I was very precocious back then—dedicated crushes on every pretty girl in the Northeast by the time I was eight.”

  “You’re assuming I was a pretty girl.”

  “Indeed.”

  They clinked glasses. They toasted, “To Jewish geography!” They laughed together.

  This is disgusting, Lizzie thought. She is disgusting.

  I am disgusting.

  Lizzie’s mother, who had never evinced interest in Lizzie’s research, now slavered for details of their guest’s work. He explained his theory that every culture had its own signature ideal of remembrance, its own term for grasping helplessly at the past—the French nostalgia, the Portuguese saudade, and then along comes us, he said, grimly determined to bring down the mood. Zachor: never forget. Camps, deportations, death, pain. Destruction of the temple; enslavement of the Israelites; famine in the desert; exiles and inquisitions, ghettos and uprisings, death, death, death. And always with the imperative never forget, as if forgetting pain has ever been the problem. Let our enemies zachor, he said, this is a moral imperative, but the victims of pain, the victims of suffering and persecution? This is my moral imperative, he said: to help them forget.

  Lizzie’s mother gazed, dazzled. “You didn’t tell me he was so fascinating.”

  “How’s Eugene?” Lizzie said, apropos of nothing but her steadily rising gorge.

  “Eugene’s a putz.”

  “Boyfriend?” Strauss asked.

  “He’d like to think so.” She winked.

  In return, perhaps, for Lizzie’s evocation of her mother’s drive-time lothario, her mother asked whether—now that she was moving in such rarified intellectual circles—she still insisted on watching that misogynistic drivel, then asked Strauss whether Lizzie had revealed her most secret and sexist of guilty pleasures. Despite surely knowing said pleasure was secret for a reason, especially from the man so aggressively hochkultur that he not only didn’t own a television but didn’t even realize this was supposed to be cause for smugness.

  “It’s for research purposes,” Lizzie said. Her mother issued an ungainly snort.

  “What misogynistic drivel are we discussing?” Strauss asked, and Lizzie’s mother outlined the soap in her preferred terms, a retrograde vision of fifties domesticity, its wide array of female archetypes extending from wife to mother to homewrecker to wife. She was forgetting heiress and perfumer, Lizzie thought, but declined to say.

  “My sense of the cultural landscape is that drivel is equal opportunity, but it’s only culture designed for women that’s loudly and universally derided as such,” Strauss said. “Maybe our Lizzie is watching it as a subversive feminist act.”

  The idea that Strauss imagined her a subversive was almost enough to make up for the our.

  “It’s fascinating to watch the scramble—especially among the pretentious, and mea culpa on that—when the lines between high and low culture get redrawn, don’t you think?”

  “Fascinating,” her mother agreed thinly, and Lizzie couldn’t help but think that whatever game they were playing here, she’d just scored a point.

  After dinner, more pictures: neon shirts, plastic glasses, side ponytail, rainbow leg warmers, cherry lip gloss. You could almost smell the hair spray, the raspberry-scented cream with which Lizzie had shaved her stubbornly hairless legs. There was a display of grandchildren—and an obligatory round of compliment and demurral regarding whether Lizzie’s mother was old enough to sire any. Lizzie was surprised to realize her mother knew not just the kids’ names, but their likes and dislikes, their latest achievements, and each memorable incident of saying the darndest things. This was genuine affection; this was pride and pleasure. Her grad school friends, even the unmarried ones, were constantly needled by their parents about the likelihood of imminent offspring—but not Lizzie, whose mother had always purported to be wearied by the concept of grandchildren and the consequent bragging. It now occurred to Lizzie that her mother’s reticence on the subject might be for Lizzie’s benefit. Maybe she let her daughter believe she didn’t need more grandchildren because she assumed Lizzie would never be in a position to supply any.

  Strauss’s phone was stocked with pictures of his own, preschool portraits of his daughter, a ringleted blond toddler with a toothpaste smile. “My wife is an apostate WASP. I’m afraid it shows.”

  “She’s lovely,” Lizzie’s mother said.

  “With no help from my brackish side of the gene pool.”

  Lizzie’s mother assured him that any child would be lucky to inherit his dashing DNA, his genius genes; what a prize for a wife, what a wonder for a daughter. Lizzie stuffed down a third slice of cake. She had, via her own bad judgment, manifested this night. Her mother, fed up with the complaints leading up to the evening, had the same question for Lizzie that Strauss had posed: why tell him about the invitation, if she was so horrified by the idea of him accepting it?

  Some part of her had wanted this. Maybe as a test, proof she could feel appropriately about him, that she could will her emotions into a more permissible shape. Or maybe because hel
lish proximity to him was better than none at all. When hell abated, Lizzie gave Strauss a ride to the SEPTA station. He preferred trains over cars, because the train offered time to work. Lizzie had taken his cue, and now skimmed journals on her daily commute. They pulled in to the deserted parking lot and he peered out with distaste.

  “This is how you get home? Then you walk back to the house? Late? Alone?”

  “It’s the suburbs. I’m not too worried about getting mugged.”

  “Maybe I’m worried. Didn’t I just promise your mother I would look out for you?”

  Lizzie closed her eyes, let her head drop heavily against the backrest, swore.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Not to be reductive, but it’s your name.”

  “No one calls me that.”

  “Lizzie is a girl’s name. You’re not a girl.”

  “Right. I forgot. You know me better than I do.”

  “You’re angry at me.”

  “That would be unprofessional.” Her head hurt. She wanted to open the window, breathe something that didn’t belong to him.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said. “How old were you when your parents separated?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in psychoanalysis.”

  “That’s not why—”

  “Fourteen. And they didn’t separate. She separated from us. We stayed in the same place, she left.”

  “That must have been hard on you.”

  “Not as hard as it was on him.”

  “Your father. What was he like?”

  This was her least favorite question. He was like air and stone and brick and water, he was the materials of life, too much everything to describe any one thing, and so, always, she fumbled, felt inadequate, because the details—black hair, crossword puzzles, cat allergy, dentist jokes, barbecue tongs—added up to so much less than the whole, and any attempts to distill the whole were feeble, generic, made her feel traitorous and him forgotten. The overpowering memory of wanting him back was leaching away her memories of him, his distinct him-ness. He was a tree. He was a laugh. He was a hug, the safety of arms that would always open for her, hold her steady, hold her tight, but she did not talk about this.

  “He was good. He didn’t deserve any of it.”

  “You’ve never forgiven her.” Strauss looked out the window at the deserted tracks, the flashing signal lights. A train thundered into the station. Lizzie answered under cover of its roar, yes, never. They stayed in the car. The train loaded, pulled away.

  “My daughter is perfect,” he said. “There’s nothing broken in her yet.”

  He was calling her broken, and she should have resented this. She wanted to be wanted for her strength. She had always thought, at least, that this was what she wanted. But now, breathing beside him, she wanted only to stop feeling like she was hanging on to life with a slipping grip—she wanted someone to recognize the strain in her smile, give her permission to fall.

  “I was so young when I met my wife, you know. We were only half people, half possibility. I thought she was brilliant, beautiful—she thought I had the possibility to be someone entirely other than what I turned out to be. And now… she thinks of me as someone she has to endure life with. I’m not interested in enduring.”

  Lizzie did not want to know about his beautiful wife or his unbroken daughter. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “That’s the question.”

  He would not face her.

  “I thought if I subjected myself to this ridiculous dinner, it would remind me.”

  “Of what?”

  “That you’re my student. That you’re absurdly young.”

  She could stop this from happening, or she could let it happen. She did not want to want this. She cupped her hand around the gearshift, wanting something firm, something real. Then his hand was on hers. That, too, was firm, real.

  “I wanted to be a better man than this.”

  This kiss was different. She was fumbling, urgent, but he was slow, steady. He pressed her trembling fingers to his cheeks until they stilled. She smoothed her hands across his stubble, as she’d waited to do for so long. She closed her eyes and breathed with him. She slipped her hands beneath his shirt, sought warm skin.

  “Not like this.” He pulled away. “Not like criminals, in a parked car.”

  They drove to the Meadowlark and locked themselves in his office. “I wanted you the first time I saw you here,” he said.

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Elizabeth.” It was no good here, both of them standing up, parking lot fluorescents casting seedy glow through the curtains. Here he was both Strauss and Dr. Benjamin Strauss, she was Lizzie Epstein who still felt like a girl but also this stranger, this Elizabeth, whose existence he’d willed into being, and it was Elizabeth who let him back her against the wall, kiss her neck, kiss her throat. She was wearing a saggy beige bra. She had shaved nothing. He was peeling away and peeling away until she stood in her striped cotton panties. His shirt remained buttoned, his pants buckled, and she realized she was supposed to be taking action of her own, enacting desire. It was cold. She was cold. He eased himself down to his knees. Kissed her stomach. Kissed the narrow lace band of her underpants, sliding them down. She shivered. Crossed her arms over her breasts. He stopped. She had never seen him from above. His hair was thinning.

  He looked up. “Is this okay?”

  It was not okay, him all the way down there, her up here, alone, exposed. She wanted his arms around her. She wanted his face pressed against hers so she could remember that she did want, so she could feel less alone and not more so, but she did not know how to say this. She dropped to her knees and met him there. She unbuttoned his shirt so she could feel his skin against hers. She imagined their hearts sending secret Morse code messages to each other. SOS.

  “Save our ship,” she said, kissing him again, and let herself believe, if just for this night, that he would.

  WENDY

  A prayer

  Lizzie wants to know if I believe in God. There’s a theory, she says, that the capacity for belief is cognitively innate. Our brains are designed for gods the same way they’re designed for language. She wonders if this varies from person to person, if there’s a cognitive setting for faith. It could be lodged in the genome; it could be invented, like the rest of me. The question, she says, is whether we need a god, or simply want one.

  Here’s what I believe in: you.

  Aren’t you my creator? Isn’t it inscribed somewhere in your genes, brain, hippocampus, soul exactly how long I have to live and where I’ll go when I die?

  I won’t ask you not to come back. Just try to remember me when you do. Please.

  VIII

  LIZZIE

  So she is the other woman, the mistress, the thing on the side. The homewrecker. The whore. She is the serpent, she is the succubus. She is the vector, his secret and his sin. It’s hard to get a handle on her, this new self. Since her mother’s affair, Lizzie has built her foundation of self on the certainty that she is not the kind of woman who. Now she has. So she has either fundamentally misunderstood herself and her capabilities or she has misunderstood the act of which she now finds herself repeatedly capable.

  The second time they meet in her house when her mother is out and fuck on her mother’s paisley sheets.

  The third time they close themselves into an unused subject room. Flattened between his body and the wall, palming plaster, she can’t move and does not want to. It’s too bad the bed no longer comes with restraints, she says after, joking and not, and he says maybe something could be arranged, he knows a guy.

  The fourth time is their first in the morning, sunlit bodies all moles and flab, rosacea blush of his cheeks and swollen nose, ACL scar on his knee, slightly scoliotic curve of his spine.

  After that, it would be easier to pretend she stops counting.

  * * *

  They meet
in the dark. He makes furtive midnight calls, she lies in bed, lights off, lets her fingers follow. His wife is used to him working nights. He insists on actually working nights. Willing to cheat on his wife but not his research, she thinks, but does not say. They contrive excuses to sneak away. He never has enough time. She has the opposite problem. She learns his body, its rhythms and desires, the soft strokes that will make him moan. She learns to read the pace of his breath, the tension in his hands, knows what he wants, when he wants more, and she can say, when he is inside her, that she needs him there, that she loves the feel of him, the slide and thrust. This is permissible. He reads her, too, with fingers and tongue, and what starts well gets better, easier. He never says need, only want. They don’t talk the way they used to. They talk like this, bodies in conversation, give and take and give. She has never wanted someone so much, and sometimes she loses herself as she has never been able to, gives way to brute sensation, stops worrying about pleasing him or seeming pleased herself and simply sighs and feels. Sometimes, mind-bogglingly, sex is sex, even with him, pleasant but mundane, and he feels the same as any other body in the dark.

  She still can’t believe she has permission to want him. Wanting is all she will let herself feel. She tells herself she can control this, parse it out, can accept having this much of him, for however much time he allows. She will want his body, and his presence, and nothing more. This will be their fugue, and she will not ask for his future, she will not ask for his heart, she will not ask anything but what she has miraculously been offered. She tries. They order Chinese food. They eat Ben & Jerry’s out of the pint. He smears ice cream on her so he can lick it off. He gives her a list of his Philly favorites: favorite cheesesteak, favorite water ice, favorite pretzel, favorite ziti; sends her on missions from which she is to report back. He wants her to love the city as he loves the city. He leaves Butterscotch Krimpets in her mail slot, because these were her favorite after-school snack. He calls her Elizabeth, and it feels like their secret.