Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  She let him shuffle this other girl toward the bed. She let him slide his hands up her back. He could have been anyone. She could have been anyone. She willed herself: be anyone.

  Be anyone else.

  He did not ask if she was ready, he did not ask if she was sure. He tore open a condom, rolled it onto his dick, and she waited, awkward, unsure what she was meant to be doing with her lips, her hands, whom she was meant to be pleasuring and how, then remembered this accumulation of hands and pits and neck and dick was not her concern, as she was plainly not his, and when he wedged himself inside her, and she gasped, the burn of it, the sigh of it, the finally of it, crossing a line that would never need be crossed again, it was like she was alone. She could endure inside the moment. The pain. The sweat. The weight of body on body. The relief of it, to be crushed beneath. When it was over, she was almost surprised to find him still there, because he seemed so incidental to the experience. It felt almost as if she’d lost her virginity to herself.

  * * *

  He woke up when she started crying.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Did I do something? Did you not—fuck.”

  “It’s not you.”

  He put his arms around her, and they breathed together. This would hurt Daniel worse than the sex, she thought.

  “You can tell me.”

  He lived with his parents. She had tongued his nipples and he had burped into her unwaxed pubes. She was never going to see him again. “I’m not an alcoholic,” she said.

  She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she felt his body tense. “So you’re a liar,” he said, his lips moving against her neck. He whispered, “Little lying bitch,” tongue flickering at her flesh on each L, then laughed and said he was kidding. Unless she had infiltrated the meeting simply to gawk at the freaks, in which case he was not kidding, so which was it, he said, fraud or fuckup? There was a right answer and a wrong answer, Alice understood, and she was naked in this stranger’s bed. She gave him an answer he would want. She had made her one mistake. She would lie to him persuasively, then never see him again, consider herself lucky to have escaped the night alive.

  She was from the desert, she told him. She had hitched across the country, because why not. It was unexpectedly pleasurable to lie. He already thought she was the kind of girl who drank, who slept with random men then wept in their arms; he believed her. She said it was pills she liked too much, not booze, that she’d gone to the AA meeting hoping to score, and she said it like that, booze, score, thinking this was the way this kind of girl would talk. “Don’t worry, I’m definitely fucked up,” she told him.

  “You?” He touched her nose, then his own. “Me. You have no fucking idea.”

  She wanted to leave, but didn’t know the etiquette for this. So she let him spoon her, tried to relax, or to seem relaxed enough that he would believe it. His sheets smelled like old pizza and her own familiar funk.

  “You still don’t know my name,” he said, then whispered, “Rumpelstiltskin,” but she pretended she was already asleep.

  WENDY

  Hello, my name is Wendy

  My name is Wendy and I’m an alcoholic. My name is Wendy and I’m an addict. My name is Wendy and I can’t help myself.

  Church basement. School basement. Community center basement. Metal chairs. Weak coffee. Good doughnuts. No IDs. Every one of us a Doe. Like a family.

  It was an accident, the first time, a room in the library. I am allowed to go wherever I want, but with no car, no ID, no money, this is an illusion of freedom. I can only go to the places I can walk to, the places where, even if I have no purpose there, they are obligated to take me in. The library is small and smells of mold, but they will answer any question, and never ask me to leave. One day I noticed a door, one I hadn’t seen before. I opened it, saw a roomful of women. One of the women asked what I was looking for. I told her the truth, that I had no idea. You’ve come to the right place, she said. Sit. I only saw the sign on the way out, Alcoholics Anonymous, and I thought, I could be an alcoholic. I could be anything.

  I am anonymous. Where else do I belong?

  They say tell your story and be healed. We say hello, my name is, and once upon a time, I did, I chose, I leapt, I’m still falling.

  Please, help me up.

  They drank to feel less alone. They drank to feel less pain. They drank to forget. They cannot forget. They come to these basements. They tell these stories. And together, we all remember.

  Hello, my name is Wendy, and I don’t remember.

  IV

  ELIZABETH

  The nineteenth-century hysterics of the Salpêtrière could be hypnotized into happiness—or at least a simulacrum thereof—and what was hysteria if not the body’s capacity to enact a feeling it had no cause to feel? What hysteria was: whatever the men who helmed Paris’s largest women’s hospital—that “Versailles of suffering,” that “Pandemonium of human infirmities,” that “grand asylum of human misery” (so sayeth said men)—deemed it should be. It was sometimes a convenient label for inconvenient women: prostitutes; criminals; freethinkers; girls who didn’t want to sleep with their fathers, brothers, bosses; wives who no longer wanted to sleep with their husbands. It was a disease, embodied and suffered; female bodies acting out unspoken pain, seizing and twitching and convulsing; symptoms with no apparent cause. It was, etymologically, a wandering womb—you could say, the female body struggling to escape itself. It was, under the late nineteenth-century reign of Jean-Martin Charcot, lord and master of the Salpêtrière and all it contained, the major disease of the modern moment. Its master diagnostician, elucidator, savior was Charcot; its face was Augustine. He translated her body into story, and narrated it for the world. I told it again, my way.

  Louise Augustine Gleizes: born 1861. Attacked by an older friend’s husband when she was ten years old (attacked likely being discreet euphemism for what man did to girl). Sent to a convent school where nuns bound her wrists to keep her from masturbating, then exorcised her when this failed to work. Returned home only to be raped—no euphemisms this time—by her mother’s employer. A man who, it turned out, was having an affair with her mother, an affair that might have produced Augustine’s brother. It was speculated that mother offered daughter to her lover as a bribe, or perhaps a gift. The incident provoked Augustine’s first hysterical attack, which was treated with bloodletting. I imagine her commitment to the mental hospital in 1875 came as a reprieve.

  Augustine at fourteen, officially stricken, a model patient, photographed in her agonies and ecstasies, soon to become the most famous of the hysterics, inspiration for artists and poets and sad young girls. Charcot made her his star patient, the belle of the ball—sometimes literally, waltzing with the Parisian elite at the hospital’s bal des folles. He studied her, photographed her, exhibited her, electroshocked her, cured and employed her, then readmitted her after a relapse. He treated her like a valued guest for as long as she played nicely; locked her in a basement cell at the first sign of rebellion, offering her one daily hour outside, chained to a stone bench in the sun. Louise Gleizes endured the Salpêtrière for three years, then disguised herself as a man, fled the complex, and escaped history for good. The Augustine photos are forever. The image they chose for my book cover was the one I’d seen first, the one Benjamin had taken from his office and offered to Wendy Doe. Augustine sitting up in bed, arms outstretched and face radiant, turned up as if to her God. Attitudes passionelles: Extase.

  Wendy got obsessed with her first. She seized on the timing, the French hysteria epidemic coinciding with an epidemic of fugues. Something about nineteenth-century France drove people out of their minds: Women fled inward, trapped inside misbehaving bodies and the asylums that housed them. Men simply fled. Slipped loose the surly bonds of past and progeny, wiped their own memories, and went on walkabout.

  Here’s how you hypnotize a hysterical girl: use the steady vibrations of a large tuning fork to mesmerize hysterically susceptible girls into a catale
ptic state. Here’s what the hypnotized girl will do: anything you want. Possibilities include smile, frown, kiss, grope, slap, undress, enact semiscripted melodramas like the ever-popular mariage à trois, in which a girl would be hypnotized into believing the left side of her body was married to one man while the right side was married to another. Mutual fondling would then commence.

  Here’s why you do it: For science, at first, presumably. For an audience then, to gain respect or funding and, the great doctor Charcot being only human, to show off. Then for fun, because it was fun. They didn’t even try to pretend otherwise.

  The skin of some hysterics was so sensitive that a finger lightly traced across flesh would raise an angry red line. So doctors drew pictures on the girls’ skin, signed their names. This belongs to me. This is a game we played during our sabbatical year in Paris. I would write secret messages on Benjamin’s skin. He would explore my body for hysterogenic zones, map my body the way Charcot mapped his girls, press here to trigger a hysteric attack. Make me feel something, I would say to Benjamin, and his fingers would probe and press. A passionate attitude. An ecstasy. Sometimes he made me feel and sometimes he didn’t, but I knew how to pretend.

  * * *

  The books all said to pour your grief into your work. Make something beautiful. Every day, I swiped my oxymoronic permanent visitor pass at the university library, nodded politely to the mild girl at the desk—it was technically a series of ever-changing mild girls and occasional boys, but they registered in my memory as a single face—took the elevator to the fourth floor where the carrel I’d occupied on and off for the last decade was reliably empty. I’d chosen a spot in the far corner of the folklore and mythology section, behind a collection of dusty journals as forgotten as the gods and monsters they recorded. Someone must have sat there sometimes, whether in the hours after I gave up for the day or the decades before I’d claimed my spot. The splintered wood was bedecked with petroglyphs: initials, hearts, dicks. I toyed sometimes with the fantasy of abandoning my own work in favor of an anthropological investigation of the collegiate mind, via its etched and Sharpie’d designs. Somewhere in this library, I mused, was a Rosetta stone of adolescent hormones.

  This was where I poured my daily grief: distraction, daydream. When Benjamin died, I’d been a year into work on a book about Anna Göldi, the last woman executed as a witch. It would have been my first wholly non-Augustine project, proof to myself and the world that I was not the pop historian equivalent of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Then Benjamin was gone, and my attention span—and ambition, appetite, ability to imagine progress into a future brighter than the present, all necessary components of fooling oneself into writing a book—departed with him. If I’d been an accountant, I thought, or a lawyer, or—better yet—a manual laborer, able to mark time with the mechanics of hoisting or shoving, digging or plowing, maybe I could have poured my grief into my work. If I’d had a boss, or—better yet—a drill sergeant, I could have shut down my brain and allowed my body to heed command. These were fantasies that, even in the depths of self-absorbed despair, I knew better than to admit out loud. My life was meant to be the fantasy—no employer, no office, no time clock. Accountable to no one but myself. I was supposed to be grateful.

  The line I’d parroted in countless interviews: History, like writing, is an exercise in decision making. If, as the discipline of psychology had drilled into me in my former life, no two eyewitnesses would ever tell exactly the same story of a crime, what hope was there for an objectively accurate narrative of a past none of us had personally witnessed? My job: To sift, select, selectively ignore. Decide what counted as evidence and what did not; decide how to deploy the evidence to compel belief in the story I’d decided to tell. Except I was no longer in shape to make decisions. I had enough trouble choosing what to eat for dinner—many nights I gave up and fell asleep without.

  I couldn’t think unless I was thinking about him. So when a small academic publisher queried my agent about whether Benjamin Strauss’s biographer wife might want to write a biography of her dead husband, I mustered the will to decide on an answer. I decided not to say no. The days needed purpose, and the only purpose that made sense was remembering him, however I could. Two birds, one stone. Now my work was my grief, my grief was my work, and I had no one to blame but myself.

  I came to the library every day. I read through his early papers, the ones he’d published before I met him, and this was almost manageable. The closer I got to the year we met, the slower I read—and this was only the beginning. The book demanded a personal touch, not just the resurrection of our marriage, but a deep dive into his research notes, his archives, his emails. Writing the story of a life required a wholesale violation of privacy that made it impossible to pretend away his death. Every day was an accumulation of small reminders that Benjamin was gone. Reading his emails, prying open the lid of whatever secrets he’d had left, would be admission he was never coming back. So I manufactured delays. That day, I was due at the Meadowlark, where Mariana Cruz, his longtime second-in-command, now acting replacement, had deigned to grant me an interview. I hated returning to that building and its ghosts, almost as much as I hated Mariana and the thought that there was anything she could tell me about my husband that I didn’t already know, but it was a more palatable opportunity than reading any more deeply into his past.

  A cup of coffee landed in front of me, almond milk, a spoonful of sugar, exactly the way I preferred. Leaning against the carrel and looking, as he always did, unduly proud of himself for the successful delivery of contraband, was MIT-educated and Ivy-tenured, double doctorate in physics and history, Guggenheim-, NEA-, and Pfizer Prize–winning professor Sam Shah, also known as the closest thing I had to a work friend. “Get anything done this morning?”

  When I confirmed failure, he did not judge. I’d been working on Augustine for two years—by which point my amateur research skills had driven me into enough brick walls I was nearing admission of defeat—when Sam had claimed a carrel on the opposite side of the library. I was thirty-three, newly a wife, he was twenty-seven, a baby historian low on the tenure ladder but scrambling up with monkey speed, as willing to tutor me on nineteenth-century political philosophy as he was to spill strategies for sucking up to Parisian archival bureaucrats. After the book came out, in all its pop-history, hybrid-historico-memoir glory, he was the only member of his department to treat me—when the occasional capitulation to undergraduate will forced them to suffer my presence—like a colleague rather than a hack. He was the only man I knew who was as smart as Benjamin, but unlike Benjamin, he’d somehow been persuaded I was his intellectual equal. His thick glasses were the wrong shape for his face; his beard was a magnet for crumbs. I liked him. Not, as we used to say when we were kids, like liked him. Not anyone ever again, maybe, definitely not Sam, now. We were friends, and after Benjamin, it was the only kind of friendship I could tolerate, one that had nothing to do with Benjamin, and so one that had escaped the distortion effect of his absence. The women I knew were all wives, and I was something other now. I was pity object; I was nightmare future; I was widow. With Sam, our relative marital statuses had never been relevant, nor had any other region of emotional topography. We talked about his latest projects (the intersection of nineteenth-century degeneration theories with developing theories of heat; the steam engine as locus for economic, physical, and scientific concepts of work) and my ever-expanding list of possibilities for future ones (Dora, witches, lobotomies, Zelda Fitzgerald, vibrators, even, for one ill-advised research season, the nineteenth-century craze for clitoridectomies). We talked about the birth of modernity and the arrow of time and why we remember the past and not the future. We talked about whatever we thought, and nothing we felt.

  I admitted I was distracted, and not for the usual reason. I told him about the unexpected guest, in the broadest of terms, the daughter of a research subject Benjamin and I had studied together. “My last research subject, actually, before I left the fiel
d.”

  Unlike most people, Sam had never asked why I stopped experimenting and started writing; he was a physicist who’d done the same. To him it must have seemed a natural course.

  “Do you miss it?”

  I shook my head. “It feels almost like a different life. Like I’m a different person now and I’m just remembering things that happened to someone else.”

  Sam had an excellent professorial hmm, almost as rich with unspoken analysis as Benjamin’s. “Would it comfort you to know that physics leaves open the possibility? That maybe you are?”

  “What, because our cells all get replaced every seven years? You know that turns out to be bullshit, right? Your heart and lung and skin cells might be interchangeable, but neurons don’t get replaced. We are who we are.”

  Sam laughed. “Leave it to you to bring everything back to the brain. I’m talking basic physics. Unquestioned assumptions. Example: we assume you and I are two separate organisms rather than one. Why? Because we assume discontinuity across spatial states.”

  “I’m here and you’re there.”

  “Exactly, and so I’m me, you’re you. This table, a separate object between us.”

  “Okay…”