Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  I tried to be mindful of other people’s suffering. Benjamin’s mentor was dying of prostate cancer. My last remaining grad school friend had endured four miscarriages and several endometriosis surgeries before undergoing an emergency hysterectomy; at forty-five, she was trying to adopt. Our dry cleaner’s son was in a coma, and according to the sign, she could afford his care only as long as customers kept stuffing crumpled bills into the box. Sam’s sister-in-law was a Somalian immigration activist whose Occupy-era arrest record was about to get her deported. My sister’s youngest daughter had type 1 diabetes, her oldest son was a recovering heroin addict, our mother had dementia, and Becca cared for them all almost single-handedly, which did not make up for the fact that she’d dragged our non compos mentis mother to the polls and yanked the fascist lever on her behalf, but obligated me to keep my mouth shut. I read my emails and I read the news. Misery abounded: earthquake victims, mudslide victims, wildfire victims. Battered women murdered by their husbands. Young black men murdered by the cops. Children murdered by assault weapons. Refugees rejected, encamped, homeless and starved and dying. Bomb blasts; drone strikes; helicopter crashes; more drone strikes. Famine. Poverty. War. Genocide. There was a wild abundance of suffering, and comparatively, mine didn’t even register on the meter. I knew this. I did.

  * * *

  Even in my own house, my suffering was inferior. I knew this, too. Alice’s loss was fresh, however determined she was to pretend otherwise. She’d lost interest in asking questions about her mother, had started spending days and often nights out of the house; I deduced a boy, and was pleased for her. Sam, who continued to bring me coffee at the library, the two of us pretending away any change, wanted to know how long she intended to stay, or how long I intended to let her. I knew it would be better for both of us if she left before she got too curious again, but I’d gotten used to having her around. The room was always supposed to belong to someone’s daughter—originally Benjamin’s, and failing that, I’d briefly imagined, maybe mine. Alice was just giving the house what it wanted.

  Things were starting to cohere. A fog was lifting, certain desires revealing themselves: I wanted Alice to stay. I wanted Benjamin alive, so I could hate him. I wanted to look under the next rock, and wanted the will to endure what I found there. I wanted to tell him there was some virtue in endurance after all.

  I did not want to write this book.

  This was plausible reason for returning to the Meadowlark. At some point my agent would need to be informed, so she could handle the publisher, but Mariana, I told myself, deserved to be the first to know. The book was meant to burnish his legacy, and the Meadowlark was that legacy in glass and concrete, Mariana the designated tender of its flame.

  We arrived at the same time. It had been raining since dawn, and I looked it. Mariana, as usual, looked impeccable. Heels clacked, skirt swished. Her umbrella was large and black, wood-handled, expensive. I had no umbrella. Mariana invited me beneath hers. I declined. I wanted to feel it, the cold, the wet. Luscious evidence that I was here in my body, that the present was more real than the past. Mariana shook her head, wondered aloud why I insisted on making things hard on myself. Then she invited me into my husband’s office, where she sat me down like a guest and brought me a cup of tea.

  I told her I couldn’t continue with the book, that digging into my husband’s past and prettying it with lush prose had lost its appeal. Then I told her why.

  “That seems like a reasonable choice,” Mariana said flatly, as if I’d told her I’d opted for sushi over salad the night before.

  “I gather, from your utter lack of reaction, that none of this comes as a surprise.”

  “Is that a question?”

  Was it a question? Mariana had been Benjamin’s buffer, his amanuensis, the woman he trusted to shore up the bureaucratic walls within which he, hypothetically if ever more infrequently, could pursue knowledge with a purity of heart. I’d been googling the names of his girls, promising students, bright stars of the next generation; none of them had grown up to be scientists. I had drawn the obvious conclusions as to why; Mariana, I assumed, could do more than guess.

  Was it a question? There was a difference between suspicion and confirmation, and, like entropy, the movement from one state to another was a one-way trip. Benjamin had dedicated his professional life to the possibility that the brain could be taught to selectively unknow that which it did not want to know. He’d failed.

  “It’s a question,” I said. “Did you know?”

  “Is there any point in rehashing this? Especially in this climate, if you want his legacy to—”

  “Fuck his legacy.”

  When she laughed, she looked like a person I’d never met before. “Okay.” Mariana tapped a pen on the edge of the Lucite desk. “Okay.”

  She knew, she admitted. More than that, she’d been the one responsible for smoothing things over.

  “He wasn’t a groper,” she added, like I was to take comfort in this. He wasn’t the man who would cradle your hips at the copy machine or materialize in a dark corner, all bulges and tongue.

  “So everything… at least. Everything was consensual.”

  “Lizzie.” The way she looked at me—a very gentle contempt—was so familiar it made my eyes sting. I wondered if she knew how much she’d absorbed from him. “How would I know who said no, or who wanted to?”

  “And when he was done with them, he ruined them.”

  “Only their careers,” she said. “Which you would know about.”

  It was one thing to suspect she thought it, but another, more brutal thing to hear it out loud.

  “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not my place to have an opinion about your marriage.”

  But why else had I come? Not to find out what he was. I needed to know what I was, and she’d been there from the start—she knew who I used to be, and whatever I became. I needed a witness.

  “Please. Opine away.”

  It was like she’d been waiting twenty years for permission. “I was jealous, you have to know that.” She must have seen the look on my face then. “Not because I wanted him for myself! God. No. It was—you know he used to compare me to you, right? If you were more like Elizabeth, if you could only be creative, like Elizabeth. You know I came here to do stem cell research? You ever wonder how I ended up lobotomizing mice? I think it terrified him, looking back on it. Too risky for conservative funding sources. But he would never say that, not the great Benjamin Strauss, so instead he tells me that kind of work, it’s not for people like me. It’s for people like you.”

  All this time I’d thought she worshipped him.

  “Then I saw what it meant, him thinking you were ‘special.’ I felt sorry for you, for a while. Now… I don’t know. The ones he picked always got screwed. The ones he ignored, well—” She gestured at a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner. “It seems we got screwed, too.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “The board made its choice.” She shrugged. “Your husband spent the last decade telling me he was grooming me to take over when he retired. It’s why I stayed all this time. Apparently he told the board I was a perfect second-in-command. He told them a great scientific institute needs a great scientist at its helm, and that I’m just a bureaucrat. I’m what he made me. This whole year, tying myself in knots to impress them—turns out I didn’t have a chance. What a fucking joke.”

  Mariana never cursed.

  “I didn’t know, Mariana. I swear.”

  “They offered me the opportunity to stay on, in my previous position. Suffice to say I declined.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  She smiled, too sadly. “I hope not.”

  She was going to Michigan, she told me—back to real research, back to stem cells, a junior position in a second-rate lab in a city where she knew no one, but all she wanted, she said, after these years on the sidelines looking over the shoulders of the men she’d once wanted to be, was to finally do
the work.

  “You know the most jealous of you I’ve ever been?” she said. “It wasn’t anything to do with him, or maybe it was—but only because it had nothing to do with him. You started over, writing that Augustine book. You found something that was entirely your own. I want that.”

  I wanted that, too.

  * * *

  I drove home slowly, wondering if Alice would be there, not sure whether to hope for it or not. I was in a truth-telling mood, an exposure-and-closure kind of mood, and who knew how long it would last. If the house was empty, I thought, if I had absolute privacy to shield me from potential humiliation, maybe I would finally call Gwen and apologize. Tell her, in truth-telling mode, that I’d decided I was the one who owed the apology, I was the one who’d walked away, because it was either let myself be seen by her or be loved by him, and I’d made my choice.

  A childhood best friend or someone else’s child, I could almost hear Gwen judging me. Those are your options? Come on. All these years, all this supposed maturity, and still glomming on to other people’s families, hiding from the complications of my own. The Gwen I imagined was always meaner than the real one. That was maybe another apology I owed her, another reason I’d walked away before she could push.

  The house was empty. It felt emptier now than it had before Alice had arrived, and I suspected this would not change once she was gone. If I told her everything I knew about her mother, she would leave. This was a stupid reason for discretion, but I had better ones.

  Nina had left me a voice mail after we had dinner, apologizing “if I said something to upset you.” But she’d been understandably on edge, she said, because of Alice. It seemed like we needed to talk, she’d said, just the two of us, and I must think so, too, she’d said, or why else would I have brought the girl to dinner. She invited me over to her place. Nina lived on the bleeding edge of Germantown, not because her father had grown up there, but because the neighborhood had cycled: undesirable Jews gave way to undesirable African Americans gave way to gentrifying hipsters, postmillennial children seizing cheap rentals and progressive bragging rights. “You people fucked up this city when you ran away,” Nina told Benjamin when she announced the move. “We’re fixing it.” Benjamin, who had more than once lectured me on the politics of white flight, the redlining, the city’s Jews’ liminal state, white, but not quite white enough, told his daughter he hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to let her live in the shtetl. Still, at the end of dinner, for which he paid, he slipped her enough to cover the security deposit and the first two months’ rent. I’d never been invited inside.

  I did not want to go, certainly not now, maybe not ever. If I was going to have this conversation, I wasn’t going to have it on her territory. As I’d deleted the voice mail I had indulged the temptation of never speaking to her again, allowing that dinner to cap a relationship that had never really existed in the first place. Imagine the relief if we laid down our arms and gave each other permission to disappear.

  How much more are you going to let him take from you, my internal Gwen wanted to know, or, better question—how much of yourself are you going to give away?

  ALICE

  Alice did not intend to eavesdrop. She’d wandered the city for hours and returned to the widow’s house, spent, wanting nothing more than to shut the blinds against sunshine, crawl into bed, pull covers over her head to deepen the darkness, and pretend to be asleep until it was true. The house was empty when she arrived, which had seemed like a gift. By the time the widow came home, Alice had accomplished her mission, was in bed, trying not to hear her father’s voice, Zach’s voice, her mother’s voice playing in her head. She was tired of noise. So when the widow called her name, asked if she was home, Alice stayed silent. There was no harm, she thought, in pretending she wasn’t there. She was tired of being anywhere.

  But she was there, and when the doorbell rang and the widow greeted Nina, their voices trickling up the stairs, it seemed too late for Alice to reveal her presence. She wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on their awkward small talk, and couldn’t hear much more than the tenor of their voices and the occasional word. It was only when one of those words was Alice that she allowed curiosity to overpower etiquette, slipped quietly out of the guest bedroom, and stationed herself on the stairs, a perfect vantage point to learn what was said by women who assumed she wouldn’t hear.

  “The ears were a dead giveaway,” Nina was saying. “Too square? Slightly too big? Tell me you didn’t notice.”

  Alice tugged at her ears, about which she had always been slightly self-conscious.

  “Some things have to be beyond the realm of possibility,” Elizabeth said.

  “If I can do the math, so can you. You’re telling me you didn’t wonder if it was possible?”

  Alice willed herself to either advance or retreat. Stop the conversation or stop herself from hearing it. Either way, she advised herself, do not stay. Do not listen.

  She didn’t move.

  “I spent eighteen years hoping she didn’t exist,” the widow said. “I knew that it was possible. But even when she showed up, I didn’t think…”

  “You did think. You just didn’t want to.”

  “You’re right,” the widow said. “I didn’t.”

  Alice tugged harder at her ears, the traitors. Alice tried not to draw the logical conclusions. You didn’t spend eighteen years hoping someone didn’t exist, unless you knew she might.

  That morning, before Alice had gone into the city, the widow had asked her about her earliest memory. Alice told the story of the circus—the sticky sweet of cotton candy, the beeps and boops of dancing clowns, her father’s hand large and warm around her own, her tiny toddler foot sunk deep in a mountain of elephant poop, tears, tantrum, all of it family lore told so frequently, in such delicious and ever-improved-upon detail, that Alice no longer knew whether she actually remembered or not.

  This was not her real first memory. Her first memory: her mother, slumped over the kitchen table, crying. It was a circus-era memory, she thought, maybe three years old, maybe four. Old enough to ask Mommy why she was crying.

  I don’t know.

  Young enough to toddle after Mommy wherever Mommy goes, follow her out of the kitchen, down the hall to the front door, now open, to say, Mommy where are you going, the words like a magic spell that closes the door tight, because no one’s going anywhere.

  I don’t know.

  It had shaken something loose in her. That some things could not be known, even by the mother. That the unknowing was maybe cause to weep. What if, Alice wondered now, she’d actually wept because she remembered something, and the something was Alice?

  She went down the stairs. “She was pregnant?” Alice said to the widow. Wanted to stab her finger in air, shout and curse, spit venom at this woman who’d stolen her trust. J’acccuse, that was what she wanted, but she was Alice, polite, well behaved; she was, within the walls of herself, collapsing. “She was pregnant, and all this time, you knew.”

  The widow was shaking her head, no, definitely not, no, except, “I didn’t know. Not for sure. I didn’t know anything.”

  “You knew enough to keep it a secret,” Alice said. She turned toward Nina, then thought better of it, turned away, did not want to examine the incriminating contours of her features, eyes, chin, ears.

  “I was going to tell you,” the widow said, the line as feeble as she suddenly seemed.

  Alice wanted her to hurt, the way Alice hurt, the way surely Alice’s mother had hurt. Because if Alice was the child of her other mother, the figment, it meant the figment had been fucked by someone.

  Someone who is my father, she thought, but pushed the thought away.

  “You kept telling me you two were friends, that she was so happy and carefree here—and all the while, you knew this.”

  Alice had swallowed her district-mandated dose of sex-ed. She read the news occasionally and feminist-ish sex blogs obsessively; she both lived in the world and had
an encyclopedic knowledge of SVU’s rape-sodden version of it; she knew about consent—enthusiastic, withdrawn, unvoiced, inebriated, abrogated, and otherwise. She knew a drunk, high, or otherwise impaired woman could not be asking for it, even if she was, slurringly, explicitly asking for it. And if impairment negated consent, Alice did not see how her mother’s mind, so screwed up it had erased all record of its own existence, could offer any. Wendy Doe might well have satisfied an urge with unmitigated enthusiasm. Karen Clark could only have been violated. Which Karen Clark would have known the moment she discovered she was pregnant. Alice had had enough of these dreams to imagine how this would feel: Alice was her own worst nightmare. So wasn’t it safe to assume she was also her mother’s?

  She felt like an orphan, daughter of someone and someone else, and the someone else could be anyone, but if he were, why would the widow look so afraid.

  She felt like causing pain. “You knew your husband was probably a rapist.”

  Elizabeth did not object, and that was confirmation enough. Nina said Alice’s name, approached as if to touch her, and Alice recoiled, her mind in no condition to make any decisions but her body certain of what it needed—and what it needed, immediately, was physical removal from both of these women, so it told the widow to go fuck herself, then walked out the door.

  XI

  WENDY

  It never happened

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