Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  She wore her sleeveless black sweater with the mock turtleneck and soft black pants, the uniform that made her feel closest to the woman she imagined herself to be. Then they pulled in to the lot of the Silverado Diner, where she had last been, only ever been, with her father, and she felt like a daughter who’d climbed into the wrong man’s car.

  He noticed her quiet, did not ask. She ate pancakes here, in her previous life. Today she ordered a tuna melt, fries, anything to be a different person. She didn’t want to hear Strauss tell the story of how this had been his favorite diner when he was a child, that his mother took him to this suburb just over the city line as if it were a field trip to the zoo, see these strangers who live so much better than we do, with their maple syrup and their slabs of cake, someday this will be you. She’d heard this story before. This was her father’s story. She recognized the waitress.

  Strauss admitted that he had hit a wall with the consolidation research, unable to verify his early results, and the New York team was gaining. She pretended to listen. Strauss admitted then that he’d gotten no sleep the night before, having spent it fighting with his wife. She listened. His wife wanted him to spend less time at work, he said. She didn’t understand that science was less a job than a calling, that she would love him less, because he would be less, if he gave himself over to her any more. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, and she agreed, probably not.

  They didn’t speak on the ride back. They listened to Bach again. The next day, he did not appear for lunch, but the day after that, he did. They didn’t reference the diner. He didn’t propose a second outing. Everything stayed the same.

  She liked to sit in their corridor at night, in the dark. She liked the stillness.

  Officially, she was claiming more overnights so she could spend more time with Wendy, who rarely slept. They rendezvoused in the TV room, decaf spiked with whiskey, watched the episodes that Lizzie faithfully taped every afternoon on her mother’s VCR. She’d been saving them up to watch with Gwen, but Gwen claimed to have no time anymore. This seemed believable, as Gwen also had no time for sleep, showers, or returning Lizzie’s phone calls. It also seemed, in Lizzie’s pettiest heart of hearts, like bullshit. Gwen had the same amount of time as ever, one hour after another for twenty-four in a row, enough time to do what mattered. It was simply the order of mattering that had changed. So Lizzie watched the show with Wendy instead. Wendy, who had no family, was happy to claim these conniving, willfully forgetful women as her own.

  “Have you ever been in love like that?” Wendy asked after an evil twin had locked the good one in a basement, driven mad by losing her husband to her twin’s ravishing virtue. You were supposed to root against her wicked ways, this was clear, but also clear was the depth of her wanting, the heedless plummet. This was soap logic: she who wants most shall have. This was soap law: she who has will eventually lose. The villain would ultimately regain her heart’s desire, and love would turn her virtuous, while loss would curdle the good twin’s heart and set her on a path of vengeance. The only way out of the cycle was to love with a little more heed, but by the rules of these women’s world, careful, contingent love was no love at all.

  “It doesn’t seem like the smartest idea, does it? Giving yourself wholly over to something you can’t depend on.”

  “But what can you depend on?”

  “Exactly.” Love, the soap kind of love, necessitated a belief that life, without the object of said love, was unsustainable. It wasn’t that Lizzie didn’t want to love like that, but it was hard to imagine the chain of logic that would persuade her to allow it. She could never let herself rely so thoroughly on someone until she knew they were a permanent fixture, and how could you ever know that? She didn’t need a degree in psychology to understand why it was easier for her to pour emotion into an unavailable man. Those feelings felt real; the pain of longing denied felt unbearable. But deep down, she knew this was fantasy, no closer to love than the melodrama on-screen, and just as safe.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Do you want that? Love?”

  Wendy thought about it; she took questions seriously, like someone who’d only been asked a limited amount. “No. No, I don’t think I do.”

  “Do you actively not want it? Or do you just not actively want it?”

  “The former. I think.”

  “Romantic love? Or any love?”

  “It’s not that it sounds unpleasant. It’s more I don’t see the point. This idea of being obligated to someone else. Of needing someone else. I just… don’t.”

  Lizzie tried to contain her giddiness. This was praxis: Wendy didn’t need anyone because Wendy had never had anyone; loneliness had to be learned.

  “I figured it was the same for you,” Wendy said.

  “What? Why?”

  Again, she took a long time to answer. “You just don’t seem like you need…”

  “What?”

  “Anybody.” She gave Lizzie a funny look. “Stop making that face, it’s a compliment.”

  WENDY

  Object permanence

  This is what will happen, according to Dr. Strauss. Something will shift, and in the shifting, the memories will fall out. Think of this life as a dream. What will happen is: you will wake up.

  When the memories return, the woman who remembers them will be someone else. Someone who fails to remember me. So then: death, basically. The body will continue without me. The body doesn’t care who’s in charge.

  Dr. Strauss reminds me to be cautious with the body, as it might belong to someone else, a husband, a boyfriend, and I tell him I’d like to think I’m the kind of woman who doesn’t belong to anyone but herself.

  When I repeat this to Lizzie, she asks why a woman who belonged only to herself would take such drastic measures to escape.

  Dr. Strauss says I should think of myself as a subletter, with an ethical obligation to the owner. I say possession is nine-tenths of the law and no one can begrudge me scratching my initials into the wall. Wendy Doe was here.

  Dr. Strauss thinks he has an ethical obligation to the owner, too. Every home needs its caretaker.

  Tonight I broke a glass bottle in the sink and rinsed the edge with rubbing alcohol. I raked it across the inside of my thigh. I held my breath against the pain. The cut bled nicely. I have faith it will scar. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I imagine dragging jagged glass across the face. Imagine: you could never look at yourself without seeing me.

  LIZZIE

  Wendy wanted to visit a fortune-teller. Everyone else had a story of where they came from, she said. Let the psychic tell her a story of where she’s going. Psychics were bullshit, Lizzie said, and the only story she’d get would be whatever story she wanted to hear. A test, then, Wendy proposed. Let’s see if the fortune-teller can tell I don’t have one.

  Lizzie had resolved: no more wanting what she could not have. She had always been a little unsettled by how readily she could shut down her own feelings, no matter how extreme, elect not to indulge. It seemed to indicate some lack—of depth, of commitment, of amygdaloid engagement, she wasn’t sure—but now she summoned it as her superpower. She had let some combination of Strauss, Wendy, the simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of present circumstances wake up a sliver of self that had been better left asleep. She would now return it to bed. She would, in other words, focus on her career, her education, her research subject, her future. All emotional dead ends would be officially closed off. This, Wendy, was her only viable future.

  Lizzie took her future to South Street, where the psychics were legion. South Street, where the hippies meet, so the song said. South Street, where the cool girls of Lizzie’s youth, the girls who hotboxed their way through high school, who dated boys with hemp necklaces and hacky sacks, acquired provisions for their mysteriously effortless adolescence. She and Gwen had made their own dutiful treks, but South Street would not yield its secrets to the likes of Lizzie. Tacky tourist shops, yes, their she
lves lined with glass pipes the use for which Lizzie, naive beyond her years, had not fathomed; a Wiccan outpost that smelled like her mother’s underwear drawer; a dusty record store that only made them feel less like the girls they aspired to be. Once Gwen bought a love potion; once Lizzie bought a leather cuff she never dared wear in public; each time they returned home defeated and deflated by reality. They were, in the end, girls who belonged at the Gap.

  Lizzie had picked the psychic out of the phone book. Ever the organizer. They parked a few blocks away. Wendy looked queasy.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t tell me this was where we were going.”

  “Do you know this neighborhood? Are you feeling like you’ve been here before?”

  Wendy shook her head. “I just… don’t like the feel of it.”

  “You want to go back?”

  “Fuck it.”

  The psychic’s suite was up a narrow staircase. It doubled as her apartment, the living room curtained off by shimmering beads, and smelled like the fried chicken joint downstairs. Madame Harriet, in a purple caftan and several ruby rings as large as her swollen knuckles, faced her customers across a weathered wood table. A pale purple runner sliced down the center: macramé, of course. There was no crystal ball. Lizzie had encountered a fortune-teller only once before, a college girl at a carnival booth, who’d told Lizzie she was destined to marry rich. Madame Harriet took Wendy’s hand and thanked the spirits in advance for their willingness to contribute. When Lizzie made manifest her “negative energy,” Madame Harriet suggested she either open her mind or wait outside. They held hands. They breathed evenly, together, Lizzie through her mouth because Madame Harriet smelled so thickly of lavender.

  The tarot cards told Madame Harriet that a great change was imminent in Wendy’s life, one that might present itself as opportunity or disaster, depending. Depending on what, Lizzie wanted to know, but her want was denied. Next, palm reading: Madame Harriet diagnosed Wendy’s lifeline as long. There would be health difficulties, she warned, but these would be overcome, resulting in greater strength. “A hard road, but a worthy one.” After this, Madame Harriet excused herself to take a call on her cell phone, a flashy incongruity that she could somehow afford while Lizzie—gainfully, nonfraudulently employed—could not.

  “You hate this.” Wendy seemed delighted by her discomfort.

  “You’re not actually buying this shit, are you?”

  “I’m not buying this—but the possibility of it? Sure, why not?”

  Even as a child, encouraged to believe in magic, Lizzie had not. No fairies, no gremlins, no monsters under the bed. God, on the other hand, she had allowed. It had seemed all too plausible, the idea of an ultimate consciousness judging her worst desires, and even in her atheistic adulthood, she sometimes caught herself in frantic mental revision: I take it back, I would never consider cheating, I do not blame him for living, I do not wish her dead, I’ve committed no sin in my heart. This exhausted her capacity for faith.

  Madame Harriet returned with an offer to do a past-lives reading on Wendy for only twenty dollars more. Wendy thanked her politely but said she already had enough lives for one person.

  “And you, skeptic?” The psychic took Lizzie’s hand, squeezing too tight for Lizzie to squirm away. “Half off for a second reading.”

  “I’d pay not to have a reading.” It was rude; Lizzie could live with being rude.

  Madame Harriet walked them to the door, but before they could escape, she snatched Lizzie’s shoulder. “You lost someone, someone important.”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “A woman…” She scanned Lizzie’s face, not even subtle in the search for tells. “No, I’m sensing, a man.”

  Lizzie pried away the woman’s grip. This required more flesh-to-flesh contact than she would have liked. She was forced to squeeze the psychic’s fingers, and they squeezed back. “You’ve shut yourself off from wonder,” the psychic said, as if claiming this tragedy as her own. “He’s always with you,” she added. “And he doesn’t approve.”

  Downstairs, outside, sucking air, heart doing an Irish step dance in her chest, Lizzie fumed, teared, breathed. Let the brick wall hold her up. “Bitch.” She breathed.

  It was not a normal reaction. She knew this.

  “Bitch.” Wendy leaned beside Lizzie. They watched a woman wheel her shopping cart through the gutter. A scrap of dog rode high on a mountain of bottles and rags. “She was fucking with you.”

  “Obviously.”

  She did not believe in life after death. She did not believe her father was in a cartoon heaven, or hiding under her bed with the nonexistent monsters and fairies. But after he died, she had made the effort. She looked for him—in skies, in trees, in flame. She spoke to him, and examined herself for faith that someone was listening. She tried to will him into her dreams. He was nowhere; he was gone. There was no spirit, no God, but it was still so easy to believe that someone was watching and did not approve.

  From across the street, flickering neon delivered unto them its command: Beer Here. Wendy suggested they obey.

  “It’s practically morning.”

  “We’re both adults. We’re thirsty.”

  The too-high sun beamed bright and judgmental. She should hustle Wendy into the car and back to the Meadowlark. There were notes to transcribe. Another dense Haslovitch and Chen study to shamble through. She needed fresh highlighters. She needed to start on grant proposals for next year. It had been forever since she’d been inside a bar—since LA, she realized, since she had a life, philosophical debates and department gossip soaking in cheap pitchers of PBR, sorry stipends siphoned off for a basket of wings, Lucas’s hand under the table, creeping, warm and needy on her thigh, feuds and futures temporarily truced in favor of a beery fog, the cellar dark of the pub a plausible denial of daylight, of palm trees and ocean breeze and squandered productivity, the longing for someone else to postpone reality, to say, again, just one more round. She was so tired.

  Wendy seized her hand, turned her palm over, and scratched it, viciously. Lizzie squeaked in protest, yanked herself free, and checked to see if Wendy had drawn blood. “What the hell?”

  “You’re afraid of doing anything that might hurt,” Wendy said. “But was that so bad?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Pain is just one more thing to remember.”

  “Fuck it,” Lizzie said, the throb already fading. “Let’s go in.”

  * * *

  When Lizzie drank, Lizzie talked.

  Lizzie talking: This fucking city. This fucking, fucking city. Everything dirty. Everything broken. Can’t get from here to there because you’d have to go through there, and god knows you probably wouldn’t survive that. So stick to the suburbs, sure, good, safe, sterile, hide in your little boxes behind your aluminum siding with your cul-de-sacs and your strip malls and feel good about yourself that you don’t see color, everyone’s the same, which is easy when everyone you know is the same. My father is buried in this city, but I don’t know where. Don’t know where the cemetery is. Which cemetery it is. Don’t know how to find the grave. Too embarrassed to ask. Have never gone to visit, never put stones on stone, that’s what you do if you’re good, a good Jew, a good daughter.

  Wendy had a bourbon. Lizzie had a bourbon. Wendy had a second. Lizzie had a second. Both had tequila with a beer chaser. Wendy got quieter, Lizzie louder.

  Lizzie told Wendy about Saint Augustine, whose CliffsNotes she had crammed after Strauss made her feel like an idiot for her ignorance. I am not an idiot, Lizzie told Wendy, or if I am, it’s not because I don’t know some fucking Christian philosopher’s Christian philosophy, and it’s probably anti-Semitic to say so. But anyway, Augustine, the saint. Lizzie had read about his Confessions, then tried to read the actual Confessions, because she was not an idiot, got bored, skipped to the good parts, the part about memory and time travel and God. The saint, Lizzie told Wendy, thinks we remember everything
when we’re born. When we’re born, we remember God. Life is a forgetting. Our mortal purpose is to remember back to what we’ve forgotten. You get it? Lizzie said. The saint says we’re all like you, we’re all fractions of ourselves, we’re all emptier than when we began. The saint says the past is as much a dream as the future, and only the present is real. But the present happens too fast for us to notice. Did you know all that?

  I did not know that, Wendy said.

  Lizzie felt very smart. This, too, tended to happen when she drank.

  The first time I got drunk, she told Wendy, I was sixteen, drama camp with Gwen, because Gwen was actually talented and wherever Gwen wanted to go was where I wanted to be. Wendy asked who Gwen was.

  Gwen was my best friend, Lizzie said, is my best friend, is supposed to be my best friend, who even knows what tense to use anymore? I’m not thinking about her, Lizzie said, because I promise you she’s not thinking about me. Gwen doesn’t matter, Lizzie said. I’m talking about wine coolers. Lots and lots of wine coolers. I puked. But before that, I thought, why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought it was magic, that you could just be without worrying how you were going to be. It was like being alone when you weren’t alone. And if you wanted to touch someone, you could touch someone.

  If you want to touch someone, Wendy said, you should touch someone.

  There were only three other customers, beefy guys in baseball caps huddled by the TV. The Eagles fumbled, the men shouted. The whole bar smelled like hoagie. This bar, Lizzie told Wendy, is so Philly.

  Is this what you thought it would be like to have a friend? Lizzie asked Wendy, and Wendy said, is that what you are?

  Lizzie said, I’m embarrassing myself, aren’t I, and Wendy laughed and said she liked Lizzie better this way.

  Which one would you fuck, Wendy whispered, pointing at the Eagles men.

  Lizzie raised her Rolling Rock and said, I’d rather fuck the bottle.