Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  He was married. They owed nothing to each other. He would eventually be gone.

  Hours alone in her tiny office, hunched over her work, all she could think, worry about was him. It was only when she was with him that she could focus on her work, and when she could, she did so obsessively. The druggy combination of desperation and wild desire she felt for Strauss, she also felt for the fugue project. The two were married in her mind, as if they had enabled each other, as if they now, despite competing viciously for her attention, fed each other, fueled her need for more of both. She spent too much of her time without him miserably sifting through the details of their past encounters and the odds of future ones; she knew an end was inevitable, but for it to arrive without warning, without girding, felt fatal. He urged her to enjoy the infinitesimal present, the perfection sandwiched between beloved past and annihilating future, and when he was with her, she almost could.

  She felt, in every way, awake. On the rare nights Strauss fell asleep with his arms around her, she stayed up, making feverish lists of new research avenues: How could a woman with no past distinguish between memory and dream? How could she imagine the future if she couldn’t imagine the past? How were glucose levels indicative of the participation of the limbic system? How can we know if our choices create or reveal ourselves? She listened to him breathe, nudged him when he began to snore, and let herself fantasize a brilliant future, not just tenure, not just prizes and publications, not even just the MacArthur, but the way it would feel to create a fundamentally new model of human consciousness. How it would feel to discover something profoundly true—to think of something that no one in the history of the planet had thought.

  “See? I’m the same as ever,” Lizzie told Gwen. “Still planning to take over the world. Stop worrying.” She didn’t tell Gwen how confusing it was that lust and ambition had tangled; that too often, when she dreamed of triumph now, it wasn’t the moment of discovery she longed for. It was the moment she could report it to Strauss, and make him proud. Her work used to be the only thing she cared about; now sometimes she feared she only cared about it as a way of being closer to him. But wasn’t that a good thing, she told herself, caring more for a person than for a project? Wasn’t that what you were supposed to want?

  The night before he left for the Chesapeake Conference, Strauss told his wife he was working late. This was at Lizzie’s request, but she was edgy, didn’t feel like being touched. He was irritable, would never say, so what am I doing here. She worried he was thinking it. This was and was not a relationship; she didn’t know how much she was allowed. There was no more discussion of breaking things off. That seemed like a joke to her now, that she’d ever thought she could step away. When they ended, it would be him that ended it, her that endured. She hated finding this in herself, but: she didn’t want to ask for too much. She couldn’t risk asking for something he refused to give.

  Strauss lounged on the leather couch. Lizzie paced, reading the spines on his bookshelves, lifting the items on his desk one by one. Stapler. Post-it pad. Pen. Pen. Best Dad coffee mug.

  “Stop fidgeting.”

  She picked up the Moleskine he used to record strangers’ first memories, but did not open it. He had accumulated more than ten of these journals, and she was forbidden access to all of them.

  “What’s the point?” she said. “All these stories, are you ever going to do something with them?”

  “Elizabeth, are you angry with me for some reason?”

  She sounded angry, she knew that. She shook her head. He took the journal gently from her hands. “Do you want to know why I collect these?”

  He gave her a different answer every time she asked.

  “It’s a reminder.” He buried his face in her hair, inhaled deeply, sighed. He loved the smell of her shampoo. She’d given him a bottle to keep in his office. She liked the idea of him inhaling the idea of her. “Each of these memories is a buoy in a sea of forgetting. Why hold on to that moment, when everything before it slipped away? If we create ourselves from our memories, then is that first memory our Big Bang? Does it determine everything to follow?”

  Lizzie closed her eyes, inhaled the idea of him.

  “The key isn’t remembering, Elizabeth. It’s forgetting.” He turned her around so they were face-to-face. “We are what we remember, yes? Yes. So ask yourself, what if you remembered something else? If our forgetting is nearly infinite, then so must be the alternate versions of ourselves. Other Elizabeths! Other Benjamins! They could exist—they do exist, somewhere in our brains. Imagine if you could choose which moments you remembered: it would be godlike. To be reborn as something new, but this time, to be your own creator.”

  * * *

  Gwen arrived for their institute lunch date bearing Tastykakes. “Carcinogenic dessert substitute, as requested,” she said. The baby dangled in a belly sling like a human kangaroo. “Now, where is he?”

  She’d been needling Lizzie for weeks about wanting a tour of the institute, which they both knew was code for wanting to meet the man who ran it. Lizzie was unwilling to risk it. She was less concerned about what Gwen might say—though this was a plausible concern—than what Gwen would hoard in her arsenal for future use. She had no interest in seeing Strauss through anyone’s eyes but her own.

  “Europe,” Lizzie said. “Sorry.”

  Gwen rolled her eyes, but allowed Lizzie to take her on a tour, and did an impressive job of feigning interest. It wasn’t until they sat down to takeout in Lizzie’s tiny office that she finally broke. “If he’s so great, why are you hiding him from me?”

  “Congratulations,” Lizzie said. “You sat on that one for almost forty whole minutes.”

  Gwen unfurled a breast and guided Charlotte’s mouth to nipple. This had once been a painstaking procedure that more often than not drove Gwen to tears, but she now did it one-handed and without looking. Lizzie glanced away. There was something about the increasing ease of Gwen’s motherhood that made her feel ever less like the Gwen who had belonged to Lizzie.

  “That’s not an answer,” Gwen pointed out.

  “Why bother meeting him? You already know you hate him.”

  “I don’t hate him.”

  Lizzie exchanged a look with baby Charlotte, and the look said, your mommy’s full of shit.

  “Okay, I do hate him. But only because he’s making you unhappy.”

  “How am I unhappy?”

  “Let’s see, you’re obsessed with someone who—where is he now? On vacation with his wife and kid? You happy about that?”

  “Not that it matters, but he’s at a conference,” Lizzie said. “Without his wife.”

  “Wait, is this that Europe conference that one of the fellows got to go to? Weren’t you hoping it would be—?”

  “It couldn’t be me,” Lizzie said. “That would have looked…”

  “So now you’re fucking up your career so you can fuck him? Does he have a magic dick?”

  “I thought you were trying to curse less in front of the baby.”

  “Okay, sorry, does he have a magic pee-pee? Because otherwise I have no idea why—”

  “How about we talk about something else?”

  Gwen spit out a single, bitter laugh. “How about anything else, please, god? I know, how about this human being I issued from my uterus that seems to hold no interest for you whatsoever.”

  “Sorry?” The more accurate adjective was confused—Lizzie had thought she was holding back on the subject of Strauss. She’d thought she was downplaying. Which invited another, equally accurate adjective: humiliated. Imagine if Gwen knew how much mental real estate she devoted to him, how Strauss was the first thought she had on waking and the last before falling asleep; if Gwen knew how often Lizzie distracted herself wondering what he was doing, whom he was with, whether he was thinking of her, how she would endure if he wasn’t. She had admitted to Gwen once, after too much wine, how jittery she felt now when she wasn’t with him, like she couldn’t quite get comforta
ble in her skin. With him, she’d told Gwen, there was a perfect stillness, as if she could breathe. She was trying to explain how it felt to need, how this felt like progress, giving herself permission to need someone this much. Gwen said, funny, with Andy it was always the opposite. Being with him finally allowed her to be still, even when he wasn’t physically there. With him in her life, she finally felt a cessation of need. Funny, Lizzie said, and resolved to stop trying to explain things to Gwen. “Let’s talk about Charlotte,” Lizzie said now. “How was baby yoga?”

  Gwen talked mothering and Lizzie nodded and asked appropriate follow-up questions and they spent the rest of the lunch break exchanging depressingly polite small talk. When they ran out of safe subjects, they stood, and Lizzie walked Gwen to the parking lot in silence.

  “Please don’t sulk,” Gwen said.

  “I’m not sulking. I’m just…”

  “Refusing to talk about anything that actually matters?”

  “I don’t understand what you want from me,” Lizzie said.

  They reached Gwen’s car. Gwen hugged her, the baby squeezed between them. Lizzie stiffened; tried not to, couldn’t help it. Gwen let go.

  “I want you to be happy,” she said.

  “What if this makes me happy?”

  “You’re reshaping yourself to suit someone else’s needs. How can that make you happy?”

  Here was another humiliating answer: Lizzie had spent her whole adult life untethered from obligation, free to suit her own needs. Was it so wrong to want to be tethered for once, to spoon herself around another body? To allow herself to feel incomplete? Gwen had given up plenty of herself for Andy and Charlotte, but they were never supposed to talk about that, how she’d settled down, and in eagerness to do so, maybe simply settled. Gwen had done what she was expected to do, and so Lizzie was expected to accept she was happy.

  “He’s getting everything he wants out of this situation,” Gwen said. “And what are you getting? Whatever he wants to give you.”

  “Maybe that’s enough for me.”

  “I don’t want to be cruel, but you need to hear this. There is no future here. He is not leaving his wife for you.”

  Lizzie refused to allow this to hurt. She told herself the same thing every day.

  “And thank god,” Gwen added. “If this is bad, imagine if you were his wife.”

  “What makes you think I want that, marriage, kid, happily ever after? Just because you did?”

  “Okay, then. What do you want?”

  Lizzie didn’t permit herself to ask that. And she could tell Gwen knew it.

  “This is not what it looks like to be happy.”

  “You’re the arbiter of feeling now? You know everything because you have a husband and a baby?”

  Gwen strapped Charlotte into her car seat with determined calm, the infuriating air of someone refusing to rise to the bait. She didn’t have to answer. The first time they’d spoken after Charlotte’s birth—before the long, sobbing calls at 3 a.m., Gwen hyperventilating, Gwen admitting she longed to climb out the window, slip into the night, start a new life that wouldn’t be beholden, for all eternity, to this alien creature—Gwen had been all awe and wonder. Had said, blissed out, she never knew what love was until now. Life had never had meaning, not really, until now. It’s like I just landed in Oz. Lizzie told herself then: Gwen did not mean to imply that Lizzie’s life was a gray Kansas prairie, that it would remain so until she, too, squeezed a living thing through her vagina. This was relevant: Gwen did not mean to be cruel. And then there was the other issue: for all Lizzie knew, Gwen was right.

  “You haven’t wanted to fuck your husband in months, and from what I remember you didn’t much care for it before Charlotte, either. So maybe don’t lecture me about what counts as a good relationship.”

  Gwen closed the baby into the car gently. Then looked at Lizzie without the anger or hurt Lizzie had expected—had intended. There was nothing on her face but pity. She spoke so quietly Lizzie had to lean forward to hear.

  “I had no idea you were so afraid to be alone.” Then she climbed into the car and shut the door. She did that quietly, too. Don’t want to alarm the baby. Gwen adjusted her side mirrors, checked her rearview, checked and double-checked the baby, did not once check Lizzie, backed cautiously out of the space, and drove what mattered most to her away.

  WENDY

  A hypothetical

  All memory is imperfect, Dr. Strauss reminds me. We all forget things that happened and remember things that did not. I am not special.

  All memory is choice and culling, Dr. Strauss says. We cannot control the brain’s choice, but we can advise. We can make the effort, in one direction or another.

  What he means to say: I have more power than I want to believe.

  I am the one who banished myself, and myself can return only on my invitation.

  Some nights we play a game. Invite your brain to imagine, he says. What if you were someone else. The brain chooses not to remember. Invite it to invent.

  Why, I ask.

  He says, to see what will happen. Why else do anything?

  So. What if.

  What if there was a woman.

  Picture her alone. Lonely. Tired. Picture her one night grinding her teeth so hard it almost wakes the man beside her, a man with fetid breath and the ghost of a beard, hair everywhere—chest, knuckles, back, chin—except where it belongs. Balding skull, shiny in the moonlight. Picture her picturing her future with this man, in this house. He tries to be kind. She tries to behave. She tries not to want the things she used to want.

  Not memory. Invention. Imagine a woman lying beside a man who could have been a stranger, who thinks one night, what if he was. Who thinks, this house feels like it belongs to someone else—what if it did. What if nothing were familiar again. What if she could leave it behind, let herself be made into someone else. What if instead of grinding teeth and trying so hard to be better, to be the woman he needed her to be, she simply was not.

  LIZZIE

  The hotel bathroom was even dingier than the bedroom. This was not what Lizzie had pictured. The weekend in Chicago was meant to be compensation for Strauss not bringing her to the conference, but also for the secrecy and the contingency and the wife and all the other ways this relationship fell short of being an actual relationship. Lizzie had imagined rose petals. Champagne. Lush bathrobes, maybe an in-room Jacuzzi. Not an airport hotel, chosen because the wife saw the credit card bills and the wife would raise her eyebrows if he deviated from frugality. Lizzie couldn’t afford a hotel room, could barely afford the plane ticket, and the idea of putting it on her credit card, letting him strategize the cash withdrawals required to pay her back, left her feeling seedier than the seedy hotel, so she let it go. They’d ordered room service, shared an overcooked and overpriced steak. The carpet smelled like cigarettes. The bedding was stiff but unstained. There was still the fact of privacy, of two uninterrupted nights together, which under other circumstances would have been enough. She couldn’t have known this night would be one that demanded a different kind of privacy. Now she sat on the closed toilet seat, shower running, wondering how long she could stay behind the locked door before he got curious. The test would register blue or pink within five minutes of pee hitting stick. There was time.

  She’d done this four other times, and remembered each bathroom: The science center bathroom, redolent with pee. The dorm room bathroom shared with five other girls, milk crates piled against a door that no longer locked. The studio apartment bathroom with the toilet nearly inside the shower. The sea-blue guest bathroom, boyfriend’s father slicing Thanksgiving turkey just on the other side of the door. Negative. Positive. Negative negative. It was the kind of truth so easy to know.

  She was in no hurry. It almost didn’t matter. If this was a false alarm, she could forget it had happened. If this was a problem, she would solve it. She had done so before. What mattered was the man on the other side of the door, waiting for her, a
nd whether she would tell him. What mattered was what he would say.

  Not, certainly, marry me.

  Not, you should have it. We should have it. Together.

  Not, unless he was a liar, whatever happens, you can count on me, you won’t be alone.

  What mattered was that she had done an excellent job of looking away from reality, but the view from the toilet seat was tunnel vision. She saw it too easily, what he had to offer, and what he did not.

  * * *

  “Why are you being like this?” he said.

  “Like what?” she said. “Like who I am?”

  “This isn’t who you are,” he said.

  “How would you know?” she said.

  “I know you,” he said. “Don’t suggest I don’t know you.”