Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  Alice knew what she was.

  “She didn’t remember how it happened,” he said. “That’s what she told me. I told her it was our miracle.”

  “What did she think it was?” Alice asked.

  “I always wanted you,” he said. “You have to hear that. I wanted to be your father.”

  That had not been the question. “What did she want?”

  “She left because of me—which means whatever happened to her, it was my fault. I wasn’t there to protect her. She forgave me, Alice. It was my job to help her forgive herself. She just needed to see it could be something good. Our fresh start.”

  He sounded desperate. She imagined this was how he’d sounded when he pleaded with her mother: to keep the secret, to keep the baby, to pretend away the past.

  Alice’s parents almost never engaged in displays of affection, public or, as far as she could tell, otherwise. But her father believed in chivalric acts of care. He unfailingly held the door for his wife, pulled out her chair, helped her with her coat. A younger Alice had studied the two of them in these moments: the gentle graze of his hand on her waist as she stepped into a building, their fingers collaborating on stubborn buttons, her mother’s smile when he took her hand, helped her out of a car, the surprised blush, like it still never occurred to her that she was someone worthy of his care. They loved each other, to whatever degree was necessary. Alice had always been sure of that.

  “And it was our fresh start,” he said. “You were. We were happy. All of us.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Oh, trust me, I don’t.” It felt like the kind of line on which she should slam down the phone. But you couldn’t slam a cell phone, and Alice couldn’t hang up on her father, whether he was her father or not.

  “Come home,” he said. “Please.”

  “Is there anything else you’re lying about?” she said. “Now’s the time.”

  “Nothing. I swear. Ask me anything.”

  “Why are you so certain she’s dead?”

  “I’ve lived with uncertainty, Alice. I don’t want that for you. For either of us. You have to trust me. It’s going to be easier for you if you decide she’s not coming back.”

  “Even if it’s bullshit.”

  “Even if.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Dad.”

  “You know that I love you, right? You have to know that.”

  “Okay.”

  When the train stopped, she got off. She didn’t care where she was. She sat on a bench overlooking the platform. She was no closer to understanding Wendy Doe than she’d been when she arrived. But she’d known Karen Clark her entire life. Karen Clark she understood, well enough to picture her after a miscarriage, feeling betrayed by her body, her luck, her husband. Karen Clark depressed. Karen Clark angry. Karen Clark, discovering irreconcilable differences between the woman she’d always been and the woman she wanted to be. Solution: trial separation from herself. No more Karen Clark. Karen Clark, so unnoticed there was no one but her husband to notice her gone.

  Then six months later, everything unruined itself, it must have seemed. Wendy fled the body, returned it to Karen, Karen returned herself to her husband, and delivered unto him a daughter. Alice could imagine her father helping his wife to understand. Teaching her the proper way to narrate her own story. He liked things to be tidy, nice.

  When Alice was ten, her parents had rented an RV for the summer, with the intention of driving to the Pacific. By Utah, they’d endured two flat tires, a minor accident, an unspeakable septic tank crisis, and what even Alice acknowledged was about a hundred hours too many of mother-daughter warfare. They dumped the RV in Salt Lake City and flew home, where her father turned the failed vacation into family lore, a series of entertaining hijinks that he seemed, in defiance of all logic and reality, to remember with genuine fondness. This was his superpower—to uncover and polish the bright side until it occluded all others; to bend reality to his will.

  He would have said to her, you lost a baby. You thought you might lose your husband. The strain of it broke you. He would have said, it’s important now that you hold tightly to both. So she did, until she couldn’t anymore.

  Here is the lesson you should learn from the soap, Alice’s mother told her, when they first started watching: your past is less important than the way you remember it. You could be an orphan who grew up on the streets, hypnotized into remembering a royal childhood, and poof, you were a princess. You could be a dashing hero with a wife and three children, brainwashed into forgetting both love and bravery, and poof, you were a nobody, with nothing. Your past, Alice’s mother said, is a story you tell yourself. If it doesn’t suit, simply invent a new one. Alice often played this game herself, or tried to. Lonely on the fringes of a loud party, shivering outside her camp bunk as a boy told her she was too ugly to kiss, she would promise herself she had only to endure the moment until it was past, then forget it. If you don’t remember, it’s like it didn’t happen. Add it to the list of lies her mother told her, because her mother must have known this was pointless. Our fresh start. Easy for him to say. It wasn’t his body that had to forget.

  * * *

  She didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t want to be alone, so she texted Zach a screenshot of the map with the little GPS dot indicating you are here, wherever the hell here turned out to be, and asked him to pick her up. She apologized for starting a fight that morning. She told him he had scared her, saying he wanted to know her. She told him she wanted him to know her, for real. But when he came for her, as she hadn’t quite believed he would, she wasn’t ready to say it.

  He’d borrowed his father’s car. They drove in silence. He put his hand over hers, and she flinched. He took it away. She didn’t want him to touch her. Neither of them had expected that. Just make it back to the apartment, she thought, to his safe room with his door safely closed, and then you can fall apart. But then they were back in his safe room, locked in against the night, two of them on the futon, facing each other, safe space between. And she still did not want to be touched.

  “You’re scaring me,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure which of the things she needed to say could actually be said.

  She needed to say: My father is a stranger.

  She needed to say: I may have destroyed my mother.

  She needed to say: I need you. Or I need someone, and you are here, so, please.

  She could not say any of these things, though, without saying the first thing, that everything about her was a lie. So that was where she began. She told him her story from the beginning, and as she did, she let herself believe she would be forgiven.

  “You were just screwing with me? This whole time, I told you everything, and you were playing some kind of game? What, find some pathetic drunk to fuck? Do you laugh about me with your friends?”

  “No, I told you, I just needed to be someone else.”

  “So who are you today, other than a liar?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know.” This was another lie, because she did know. She wanted to stop feeling like she did not exist.

  And then he was on top of her, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t want to be touched, because here he was, touching her. “Is this what you want?”

  “Get off.”

  He straddled her, heavy, pinned her arms by the wrists, stronger than he looked, and they were both fully clothed, and nothing was happening, she told herself, nothing real was happening, but he was stronger than her and he was not letting go.

  “Get off!”

  “You want to play games? You want to pretend to be someone else? Maybe I’m someone else, too, you think of that? Who knows what I’ll do.”

  She was shaking her head, because this was not happening.

  He let go with one hand, long enough to grab her boob, squeeze till it hurt. “Scared?”
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  She clawed at him. “Fuck you.”

  “Fucking liar.”

  She was pushing at him, but it was like pushing a wall, against a roof that had caved in, and under his jeans he was hardening against her and he was telling her to go ahead and cry, she was good at that, she could win an Oscar for that, lying little crying slut, and she was saying in a voice she did not recognize, please and don’t and he shouted shut up, and he hit her, hard, across the mouth.

  “Shit.” He let go. Climbed off.

  Climbed off, she told herself, before anything had actually happened.

  She tasted blood.

  “Jesus.” He uncapped a bottle, tipped it back, swallowed, swallowed, swallowed. “Shit.”

  Her lip throbbed. Her boob throbbed. Here was how it felt to be seen. She wondered, what did he see, that he did that? He approached again, tentative, held out the bottle. She took it, swallowed. She didn’t know why she was still there.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  He gave her a tissue. He’d followed through on his threat, become the kind of guy who owned tissues—for her. She blotted. It didn’t hurt, much. It was bearable.

  “I’m sorry?” Then, unconvincingly, he laughed. “Look, you got me apologizing to you.” As if this were her victory. “I am apologizing, though. Really. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad.”

  Don’t, she told herself. But, “I’m sorry, too.”

  He was standing. She was sitting. He was between her and the door. She only noted that as habit, though, the way her brain noted when she was alone in an empty parking garage or a restaurant bathroom at the end of a long, dark hall.

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to go?”

  She shook her head. She had nowhere to go.

  “You want to stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay.” He looked at the door, almost as if he was thinking that maybe he should go. “Would it be okay if I sat down?”

  “It’s your futon.”

  He sat down, sort of next to her, sort of not.

  “Watch a movie or something?”

  “Okay.”

  They watched Ghostbusters, because he had just downloaded it, and that was okay. By the time Egon invented the proton blaster, he’d put his arm around her, and that was okay. When Sigourney Weaver ripped off her clothes and declared herself the Gatekeeper, harbinger of the end of the world, she startled awake, found her head on his lap, his hand stroking her hair, and that was okay, too, so they went to bed. She let him kiss her. She let him run his fingers down her body and creep inside it, and now she knew how it felt to be touched like an apology. What do you want, he asked her, what can I do, and tonight she found herself capable of response. Do it again, she said. Hurt me again. But it was an accident, he said, he would never hurt her deliberately, he said, he was not that kind of man, he said, and she told him he owed her something, and persisted until he grabbed her hair, yanked it hard, slapped her across the face, did precisely those things she instructed him to do, hardened against his own will, rammed himself inside her with such force that she thought she might tear, and she pulled him against her. Wondered if this was power. If this was desire. What this was. What it made her.

  She bit his lip until it bled, and before he fell asleep, he kissed her with the taste of blood and asked if this meant they were even. She didn’t think she would sleep, but she did, with his arms around her, too tight. She woke up before him, lit by dawn, memorized the look of him, sleeping, smeary. She made it to the bathroom nearly in time, puked twice, once on his toilet and once on his tile. Then she stole his favorite camera and left.

  ELIZABETH

  I was a woman who had woken up beside a dead body, and the body was my husband. I had slipped my hand into his dead hand. I had endured. My husband on a stretcher, our good navy sheet over his face, and I endured. My husband a thing loaded like freight, driven away from me, and I endured. My husband a body in a box, my husband underground, decomposing, food for ants and maggots and worms, and here I still was, enduring, visiting his dirt, laying a smooth stone on the larger stone that marked the it of his body, leaving him, again, again, behind, alone. If I was the kind of woman who’d done these things, what couldn’t I do? I was the kind of woman who loved Benjamin; I was the kind of woman who stole him, married him, lost him, grieved him; I was the kind of woman who’d forgotten to ask the question, what kind of woman, but wasn’t that simply maturity, the acceptance of growing up, no longer dithering about what kind of woman would, because whatever it is, I did, and so I am.

  * * *

  I was also the kind of woman who declined to ask the right questions, until it was too late.

  It was cold and damp, but once Alice had gone, Nina and I relocated to the front stoop. She pulled a joint and a lighter out of her coat pocket. “You mind? I feel like this is the kind of conversation that…”

  I indicated I did not mind, and once she’d taken a long draw, I held out my hand. This was the kind of conversation that.

  We inhaled.

  “So, that went well,” she said.

  “Nina, we’re all making a lot of assumptions here, but there’s no evidence your father—well.”

  There was something about sitting in the dark, both of us facing the deserted street. Like we could pretend we were talking at no one.

  “She can take a paternity test. Then we’ll know for sure.”

  “If she wants to.” It was hard, under the circumstances, to imagine Alice wanting to do anything I asked of her again. She would have her own reasons for wanting to know, but whether she decided to share that information with us, or use it in some way against us, was up to her. “But even if it was him…”

  If, then what? There was no explanation that would have made a sexual encounter between researcher and subject appropriate. I didn’t just know that, I’d written the book on it. Wendy Doe was under our protection. Wendy, as I remembered her telling me many times, had nowhere else to go. If he’d slept with her, he’d done it when we were together, when he was supposedly torn between me and his wife. Jealousy was not on the list of emotions I was permitted to feel about this prospect, and I finally managed a brief flicker of hatred for him, because even from the grave he’d found a way to make me a stranger to myself, or the woman I wanted to be.

  “You really didn’t know?”

  “It’s true, what I said before. I didn’t even know for sure she was pregnant. I just knew it was a possibility.”

  “And she wasn’t… with anyone? That you know of?”

  Nina was the one who’d blown into the house wanting to know why an eighteen-year-old girl whose mother had crossed paths with Benjamin eighteen years and nine months ago had his ears. The fact that she was abruptly backing away from the possibility now persuaded me, more than anything, that it must be true. There were plenty of men around the Meadowlark; plenty of opportunities. I’d seen her with Anderson myself, his arms around her, her tongue in his mouth. At first I’d tried to think it might have been him. Then I let myself stop thinking about it at all.

  Now I tried to remember what I might have willfully forgotten, evidence I had chosen not to see, as I had with the students, with the emails. I’d written the book on this, spent years digging through the records of researchers who claimed the bodies of young women under their care; wrestled, page by page, with the question of victimhood and prey, of consent and complicity. Girls like Augustine had derived power from their helpless personas. They had, some historians argued, molded their bodies to suit the men’s needs, because compliance gave them not just fame, but control. On the other hand, I had argued, control was context-dependent. To be better off within the walls of the Salpêtrière only meant they were held hostage to its demands. Disobedience meant risking loss of what small freedom they had, as Augustine had discovered, chained in a basement on the grounds she’d once ruled as unofficial queen.

  “
She was a subject, not a patient.” I took the sloppy joint again, sucked deep. It burned. “She was totally mentally competent, even without her memory.”

  “That’s a bullshit distinction, and you know it.”

  They were close, in a way, Benjamin and Wendy. I remembered catching her hugging him once—and that was how it felt, like I had caught them. She would reference, casually, or seemingly casually, things he had told her, music he had played for her, almost as if she were trying to make me jealous. I had dismissed it at the time, because I was wholly in his thrall but self-aware enough to know it, and understand I was filtering everything through my need for him. I assumed I was projecting it onto her, if not a need for him, then an awareness of him, his mind, his presence. But maybe she had wanted him, too. Or she had not, and that was the best way she could think to say so. She had nowhere else to go.

  If he had done something, I had to believe he’d thought the something was welcome. But he would have known better; he would have felt guilty. Was it why he’d been so intent on leaving the country for his sabbatical, why he’d stopped allowing subjects to live on the institute grounds, why instead of discarding his latest mistress, as he’d apparently done without exception before and since, he married her?

  He was a man who always wanted to do the right thing. He would eventually have found some way to believe he had.

  “It’s not like he never slept with anyone he shouldn’t have.” She breathed a puff of smoke at me. “No offense.”

  Even if he was a predator, I thought, it did not have to mean I was prey. But the opposite held, too: even if I wasn’t prey, it didn’t mean he was not a predator. Still. “This is different.”

  “No kidding.”

  When she was seventeen, in town to take a tour of the one college that would not only have her but would have her for free, she’d spent the weekend with us. It was the first time in years she’d spent the night in her own house. For a while, Benjamin had kept her room as a shrine, giraffes and elephants galloping across the wall, a nightlight that spattered the ceiling with stars. She hated the college, she hated the city, she did not want me to take her shopping. She mentioned, in passing, a girlfriend—said, when he started in surprise, oh, that’s right, I guess I forgot to tell you. It was a cruelly efficient demonstration of exactly how little he mattered. But when she climbed into the taxi without hugging him goodbye, he was undaunted, radiant. September, he said, I’ll get her back.