Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  He knew her better than anyone had known her. But he didn’t know her at all, not really, because since she’d met him, she had become increasingly alien to herself. Especially now that she’d stopped talking about it to Gwen; stopped talking about much of anything that mattered to Gwen. She lived in a pocket universe and he was its only other living occupant. This version of herself was true, but not complete. This version of herself asked nothing of him, never had, so no wonder he was confused now, the two of them naked on this cheap bed under these used sheets, time stretching endlessly forward, and Lizzie finally, audibly, expressing a need.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. It was as if Gwen had infected her, had shown her a crack she could not unsee. And now, the test, the what-if. Entropy was fundamental; cracks only widened. “I don’t know how to be with you halfway.”

  He put her hand on the hard bulge in his boxers. “There’s nothing halfway about this.”

  The Lizzie he knew would have made herself laugh, and then accepted the unspoken invitation. But tonight she was not being like that. She was being like this.

  “I can’t count on you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  She could not answer that.

  “I don’t know how you feel about… this or your intentions, and every time I start thinking about the future—”

  “Elizabeth.” He squeezed her hand, hard. Tweaked her nipple. “The future is an illusion. Just as much as the past. I want to be here, now, with you. That’s how I feel about this. I’m fully clear on that. So it seems this is about how you feel. What you want.”

  She sat up. She wasn’t allowed to want what she wanted, which she resented. She wasn’t allowed to say she wanted it, which she resented even more. A voice in her head, Strauss’s voice, and she resented that, too, asked how she knew what she was allowed, and what if her assumptions were wrong. What she might be denying herself by refusing to ask.

  “This will end,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to—I can’t feel this way about you, knowing it will end.”

  “Everything ends eventually,” he said. “You would be so much happier if you gave yourself permission to accept that and move on.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Do you want to leave, Elizabeth? Is that what you’re saying?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You’re acting like a child.”

  “I hate when you say that.”

  “I hate when you do it.”

  They were having a fight, for real, a luxury she’d never allowed herself because it didn’t seem safe to shake something so fragile. She turned onto her side, away from him. He put an arm across her, gathered her in, tight, his chest warming her back, his need hard against her.

  “I bought a pregnancy test at the airport.”

  She thought if she said it with his arms around her, she would be able to sense his reaction, but there wasn’t one.

  “Did you take it?” A careful, controlled voice, betraying nothing.

  Maybe that was betrayal enough.

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  Lizzie returned home to find her mother on pink-tipped crutches, left foot encased in plaster.

  “What happened?” She was surprised to find herself genuinely distressed.

  What happened: dark house, late-night craving, forgotten stair.

  “Why didn’t you call me? I gave you the name of the hotel for emergencies—this didn’t seem like an emergency?”

  “I knew you were busy.”

  Too busy to hear about panicked crawl across tile, pain, pain, pain, a “mildly thrilling, wholly embarrassing” ambulance ride, a ride home from the recently dumped Eugene who was a prince through the whole thing until he suggested they get back together and “threw a hissy” when she refused. All this, and no one had thought to call Lizzie.

  She spotted an unfamiliar vase of lilies on the entrance table. The card read All our love, Becca.

  “You called Becca. In Israel. But you couldn’t call me.”

  “Becca called me. Becca calls me every Saturday after havdalah. When she couldn’t reach me, she called Crystal—” This was the next-door neighbor, a woman Lizzie had known for thirty years and wouldn’t have had the first clue how to contact by phone. “—and tracked me down. I’m feeling much better now, thank you for asking.”

  Where there should have been an upwelling of tender concern for her mother, there was instead: affront at the assumption she could not be counted on. Dismay at the prospect of a future in which she must be counted on. The nightmare vision of said future, their very own Grey Gardens, old maids into eternity—Lizzie helping her mother to the bath and toilet, Lizzie attending her mother’s daily pills and callused feet, Lizzie putting life on hold until her mother was dead and thus harboring inevitable impatience for the event. She was a horrible person. Victim only to her own blackened soul.

  “I was thinking that when the house sells, I might go stay with your sister for a bit.”

  “In Israel?” Their mother had taken Becca’s aliyah as a personal affront.

  She looked at Lizzie like Lizzie had suggested visiting the moon. “In Albuquerque. She didn’t tell you they’re moving home?”

  “Home is Arizona now?”

  “New Mexico, and I’ll take what I can get. Mordecai got some kind of job offer. The kids need a grandmother. And that woman—” This was the only way she ever referred to Becca’s mother-in-law, who had invited Becca to a Shabbat dinner during her lonely junior year abroad and thus was, by Epstein family calculations, responsible for all that followed. “She’s of no use to them whatsoever. Last count she had thirty-two grandchildren. It’s indecent.”

  “So now you like children?”

  “I like my children’s children.” A bold claim; she reconsidered. “Well, we’ll see. Anyway. I have something for you. I found a box of photos that never made it into an album—I got this one framed.”

  It was a picture of the three Epstein women. Becca was twelve, lips screaming pink, left hip jutting out in what Lizzie remembered as her “model” pose. Lizzie was seven, hairsprayed bangs aimed at sky, suspenders holding up pleather miniskirt. Their mother, perched over her girls, was unthinkably young and dressed younger, Hawaiian shirt knotted above her midriff, go-go boots green and knee high. Becca had wanted to enter a modeling contest, she remembered now. They’d spent the day at the mall, spent money they didn’t have, staged a photo shoot, told Lizzie’s father that they spent the day at the movies. A secret between ladies, her mother had said. One perfect day.

  She had forgotten all about it. Her mental picture of the past was streamlined to suit her needs. She remembered her father, loving him. She remembered how it felt to be her father’s daughter. She remembered watching TV with her grandmother, and her grandmother slipping away. She remembered her sister leaving, and leaving more, and eventually one day not coming back. She remembered resenting her mother’s presence then, more so, her absence. She remembered her family as the family her mother left behind. If Strauss was right, and every mind contained infinite alternate selves, then there was another Lizzie whose remembered family was this family of the picture, their happiness evidenced in goofy grins.

  “I can’t believe you’re just going to… leave.” They both heard the unspoken again.

  “You know, in all this time, you’ve never asked me why,” her mother said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why I left.”

  This was not a conversation Lizzie was prepared to have with her mother, but the fact that her mother knew this felt like a dare. “Because I know the why. His name was Dick.”

  Lizzie’s mother shook her head. “Dick was, you might say, a dick. He wasn’t a reason for anything.”

  “That’s great. It’s not that you wanted him, it’s that you didn’t want us. So glad we’re having this conversation.”

  Usually her mother would have given up. They didn’t do open hostili
ty, any more than they did honesty or vulnerability. But her mother did not stop. “There’s this idea, when you have a child, that you’re supposed to become an entirely different person. That woman you study, what’s it called, what she has?”

  “Fugue state.”

  “It’s like that,” she said. “Or it’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to stop wanting what you want. You’re supposed to want what’s good for the child. And I kept waiting for it to happen. To stop wanting things.”

  “You left because you didn’t want me? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m telling you I wanted you and I wanted more than you, and if I’d been someone else, I probably could have figured out what to do with that. What kind of mother leaves her children? No kind of mother. It was wrong. It was terrible, probably. I did it anyway.”

  “It’s not like you abandoned us,” Lizzie said, though it was like that, even if it wasn’t technically that. There had been visitation, eventually shared custody, but it had always been there: the fact that her mother wanted less of her.

  “It was selfish,” her mother said. “You think I don’t know that? I’m a selfish person, always have been. I thought that would go away when I had a child.”

  Lizzie didn’t have the nerve to ask what she would have done if she’d known better.

  * * *

  In the end, Lizzie and Strauss had taken the test together, although she made him stand outside the bathroom door while she peed. She wondered about that, alone in the dank room, trying to force out a sufficient stream, whether you could have a baby with someone you wouldn’t let see you pee. She flushed. Set the stick on the sink counter, let him back in, and they waited. She wondered what she would do if he said he wanted the baby, wanted her, that this was the excuse he’d been waiting for. Would it make her want a baby more, if he came as part of the deal? Would it make her want a baby less, if it drove him away, or would she cling to it as his replacement, finally a thing she could love without fear of loss, a thing she could possess and so control? A piece of him she could hold on to forever? Thoughts like this, she thought, were evidence she shouldn’t be a mother.

  She didn’t want to “trap” him. She wasn’t interested in that particular cliché. She did not want his child. Nor did she want to be his wife, or whatever she would become if she replaced his wife. Yes, she wanted, with Hobbesian greed, all of him, to consume him, to be with him at all times, to own every piece of him and give every piece of herself away. This was unrelenting desire of body and heart. But brain knew all of him would be too much. Would want too much. She understood this from the unspoken terms of their arrangement, the priority his needs took over hers, and she understood this from the way he spoke of his marriage, the way, though he would never see it himself and she would never tell him, husband had bulldozed over wife, flattened her into nothing. He was not a good father, she could tell. If she did want to have a child, which was unclear, she wouldn’t want to have it with a bad father. None of this made her want him less. It simply made her wants diffuse, impossible. She didn’t want to take him from Madeline. She wanted to be Madeline. She wanted to be a woman other than she was, someone who would be made happy by his husbanding, someone who would want to raise his child. Someone willing to make him her priority, someone who didn’t need to be her own. She had never wanted so much to be someone so unlike herself, and she hated him for it.

  He watched the clock; she watched the clock. She thought how miraculous the human brain was, that she could allow it to think these things while he was standing right here in front of her, his fingers threaded through hers, and he would never know. No one would ever know—the brain would swallow them, and with any luck, she would someday forget she’d thought them. That was a wonder.

  What are you thinking, he said. Nothing, she said. They watched the clock. The stick did not turn pink. There was the predictable hesitant relief, him waiting to make sure relief was an acceptable emotion, her waiting to determine whether relief was what she felt, it seeming very important in that moment to say something true. I’m sorry, she said. That you’re not pregnant? he said, nervous. No. Just. For this. That it… might have happened. It’s not like you managed that on your own, he said, relaxing now, she could tell. She felt so proud, even at a moment like this, that she could read his moods, that they were hers to read. You’re exceptional, he said, but as far as I know you’re not divine. What if I said I was in love with you, she asked him. Is that what you’re saying, he said. She said, I’m just saying, what if. They went home a day earlier than planned, kissed goodbye before getting off the flight, then Lizzie hung back, let him leave first, because sometimes the wife and daughter surprised him at baggage claim. The daughter liked to hold up a homemade sign.

  * * *

  “Did you regret it?” Lizzie asked her mother now. “Leaving? Or, I don’t know. Leaving the way you did? Would you do it different, if you could go back?”

  “Are you asking because you really want to know?”

  Lizzie nodded.

  She thought about it for a while, or at least—and given all the years she’d had to consider the question, this seemed more likely—pretended to think about it.

  “I’m sorry, but no.”

  Lizzie tucked the photo safely into her bag and promised her mother she would help get the house ready to sell, get their lives ready to pack, that they would sift through the memories together, even the forgotten ones or the ones better left that way. Maybe, all this cleared air between them, Lizzie could do a better job loving her mother. Maybe, with Becca back on the continent, she could be a better sister. They could all find their way back to some alternate version of the past. Her mother hugged her, and Lizzie allowed herself to hug back. Even with her mother’s arms around her, she knew that it would not happen, that Lizzie would absent herself from the house and packing as much as possible, would move gratefully into her own apartment and incrementally more adult life, would offer emptily to visit her mother and Becca in Albuquerque but would not, because her mother had made her choice, and chosen the easier daughter, the one willing to be chosen, and Lizzie could not hold this against her but would anyway. Still, she held on, just a little longer.

  X

  ELIZABETH

  How old I am now: not too old, I decided, to fuck someone new. There were good reasons. There was the night Alice hit Pause during a commercial for some retiree dating site and asked if I thought I would ever love again; I asked if I looked like a retiree.

  There was desire. Desire for him, against which I remained infuriatingly helpless, but also desire to feel desire again. To be desired. I was used to not having, but I was tired of not wanting. I had, of course, fantasized over the years about other men, hands and tongues real and imagined. But the idea now of touching any of them, anyone, felt about as viable as fucking the cartoon fox from Robin Hood I’d once imagined I would marry. I would have to get over it.

  And there was revenge, which I could not take on a dead man, but longed for nonetheless. There was the principle of the thing, turnabout as fair play; there was the fact of the betrayal and what should have been its consequence. Whatever loyalty I’d owed him was gone, as he was.

  My husband was dead, and I was not. That was reason, too.

  I was too young to know any widows, but I had plenty of friends who’d shed themselves of their husbands; they steered me toward the Internet and its plethora of lust-enabling apps. It seemed simpler, or at least less soul-scraping, to start with a known quantity. How old I am now: not too old to be attractive to another man. I called Sam and invited him to dinner.

  “Dinner?” He said it as if I’d forgotten the word for coffee.

  “Dinner.”

  Not too old to be attracted to another man, and if Sam hadn’t historically fallen into that category, it was only, I decided, because in deference to Benjamin, I’d not given him the chance. Here was a man who believed I was smart, maybe lovable. Here was a man whose heart beat.
r />   * * *

  Proust was right about the madeleine thing. Benjamin studied memory, and now I study him. My findings: death is a forgetting. First the useless substitution of mental for corporeal, spirit for flesh, then the creeping fade, amnesiac slippage. Death as the struggle to remember the touch of fingers and lips and taste and tongue. Abrasion of texture. Memories polished until their surfaces wear away. Absence of novelty; mess of reality shaped to fit tidy story. It’s why the best memory is a madeleine memory, dormant till summoned, its teeth still sharp.

  A lemon cough lozenge, and I remembered sweating and shivering under a wool blanket, everything snot and fever and his hand cool on my forehead, giving me permission to sleep. Burned coffee, and I remembered his first effort, so proudly proffered, the man who didn’t drink coffee because it was too easy, stymied by his new French press, until finally, like a magician, producing the mug with a flourish—disgusting, watery, grounds swimming like pulp, but I choked it down, for him, because he’d exposed himself to failure for me. Apple pie: our trip to Vienna, the sad search for his father’s house—torn down, built over, like every other trace of the Viennese Jews—the pilgrimage to Freud’s office, steaming apfelstrudel, in Hitler’s favorite café, which shamefully turned out to be ours as well, the irony, he said, Freud’s city so good at remembering only what it wants to, then kissing me across the table while old men glared, because Vienna was a place where you did desire in secret. Salted caramel: Paris again, both of us trying too hard to recapture the past, until the concert in St. Chapelle, the Goldberg Variations echoing on stained glass, a secret stash of caramels, candy surreptitiously slipped from palm to palm, sugar melting on tongue, strings soaring into impossible steeple, my hand in his hand, home again.

  * * *

  What did a widow wear to a dinner that might or might not be a date? This one wore her tightest bra, shoulder straps jacked up to keep everything in place. Strove for an illusion of firmness. Jeans, so as not to look like I was trying so hard. A slimming black sweater with a semi-indecent V, so he’d know I was trying a bit. My only black heels were the heels I’d worn to the funeral; I wore boots. Lipstick, a smudge of eyeshadow. Hair down, as it never was anymore, lightly tousled, as I remembered some long-ago Cosmo had advised, hair that looked like it had just had sex putting men in the mind for more.