Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  Wendy said, we both know who you’d rather fuck. Lizzie said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wendy said, whatever. Then said, he wants you, too, I can tell.

  Lizzie sealed her lips with her fingers, told herself not to say anything, but her lips moved, and she said that she wouldn’t want to be with the kind of man who would cheat on his wife. Wendy said that was every kind of man, and when Lizzie asked how the hell she could know that, considering, Wendy allowed she could not.

  There was too much she had never done, Wendy said. She’d never, for example, picked up a man in a bar. Lizzie laughed and said as far as you know you’ve never picked up a man anywhere. Wendy gave her the finger, then crossed the bar. She stood between the men and their screen. Lizzie thought, I should go over there, but it seemed like effort, and then Wendy was putting her hands on beefy shoulders, lips on lips. She’d picked the one with the most hair, hair sprouting from beneath the cap and hair busy on his upper lip, but also hair matting his chest above the collar of his shirt, hair on his neck where Wendy’s fingers massaged saggy flesh. And then Wendy laughed and strolled back to Lizzie as if nothing had happened.

  Lizzie had never done this.

  Did you like that, Lizzie asked her, and Wendy said, no. But how could I know until I tried. She took a swig of Lizzie’s beer, because her own bottle was empty and her need to rinse out the taste, she said, was dire.

  Lizzie laughed. Someone put Pat Benatar on the jukebox, which sounded right.

  They could not drive back to the Meadowlark. They would have to take a taxi, but Lizzie had spent her emergency taxi money on beer. Wendy had no money, was at Lizzie’s mercy. Bought and paid for, Wendy said, so what will you do with me now.

  Lizzie could not call Gwen, because Gwen was at a baby birthday party with her baby and all her new baby-breeding friends. She could not call her mother, obviously. She had no one to call.

  Wendy said it was not a problem, they would call Strauss. Even though it was a Saturday and Strauss was home, because Wendy had Strauss’s home number. For emergencies, she said, and later Lizzie thought about that, a lot, but now Lizzie punched the number into the pay phone by the bathroom, a dark cubby stinking of shit and blood, and when a woman answered, she said as carefully as she could, hello, is this Mrs. Strauss, stopped herself just in time from saying, can your husband come out and play?

  By the time the taxi pulled up to the Meadowlark, Lizzie was feeling slightly more sober. Wendy had fallen asleep on her shoulder.

  Strauss was waiting on the curb. She’d never noticed it before, his ursine affect, but noticed now. Nervous system registered hairy and large and growling, read threat, amygdala triggered hypothalamus, activated pituitary and adrenal glands, heart rate increased, pupils dilated, face flushed. Mouth went dry. Hands trembled. He said many angry things. Wendy slept in the back seat.

  When Lizzie drank, things seemed like a good idea that were not a good idea. She had the idea that if she and Strauss were in a soap, this fight would escalate until he swept her into his arms and kissed her, because sometimes love tasted like hate. She had the idea that maybe Wendy was right, that maybe he did want her, that it was possible he could want her. That she wanted, so much.

  The human brain operates on a delay. It takes one and a half seconds to process what the body experiences. Consequence: there is no such thing as living in the moment.

  Lizzie had puzzled over this line from the Confessions more than any other: Any duration is divisible into past and future: the present occupies no space. And yet Augustine also said past and future were only figments. Consequence: there is no now, there are no thens. There is only memory and imagination, no differential of reality wedged between. This made no sense to her, except that she had imagined kissing him, and then, a second and a half later, she had kissed him. The decision already made. She remembered her body making it, remembered hands reaching, skin stubbly, lips hot, eyes wide. She blamed her body. Her brain too slow to stop it.

  Strauss said no.

  Strauss shoved her away. Paid the driver. Shook Wendy awake, but gently. He was gentle with Wendy. Took her by the hand, helped her out of the car. He was not angry with Wendy. She was a nonperson; she bore no blame. He would not look at Lizzie. Informed her they would not speak of this again. When Strauss ushered Wendy inside, Wendy was the only one who looked back. Then the door closed between them, and Lizzie was alone.

  Alone, jealous of Wendy’s will, her mind over her body; Wendy Doe, master of escape. Lizzie willed her own brain: forget. The kiss; the day; the grief, guilt, loneliness, hope, failure, self. Burn it away, let me start again. Her brain did not accommodate.

  Lizzie on the curb, throbbing head in hands, waiting for Strauss to return, but Strauss did not return. Lizzie, stumbling alone and unsteady to the SEPTA station, swaying on the platform, dozing on the train, stumbling, again, cold, tired, sick, shamed, toward home that was not a home, where she hid under the same blanket that kept her childhood safe, closed her eyes against the spinning world, woke at dawn, staggered to the toilet, dropped to her knees, remembered.

  WENDY

  Augustine

  Her body was a lie. Her body told stories—of seizure, of passivity, of pain, of collapse. The body played at damage, but the body was fine. The body spoke because that was the only way to make someone listen.

  Dr. Strauss says that in a different time, I would be a hysteric. Internal distress manifesting as external symptom. He says women then had nowhere to go, so they fled into themselves. He says in a different time, I might have held on to my self but lost control of my body, watched it tic and seize and faint. The mind that wants to break will find a way, disconnect itself from a reality it rejects.

  He urges me not to pity the woman in white whose photograph now hangs over my bed, that the hospital was her refuge, and she its star. She had more power on the inside than she did out, he says, coddled by the men who knew her necessary to their own advancement. Why then would she run away, I asked once, and he said people do irrational things. Lucky for the advancement of psychology, he said, and laughed.

  The book he gave me is not about her, but about the scientists who invented her. That’s where I found her other pictures. Augustine, in a white hospital gown, captured in each stage of her hysterical fit. Augustine sitting up in bed, palms together: Amorous Supplication. Augustine lying down, swathed in white cotton, arms crossed corpselike, eyes closed, satisfied smile: Eroticism. There was Menace, there was Mockery. There was the Augustine I knew best: Ecstasy. The book quoted one of her doctors: The female hysteric represents an extraordinarily complicated type, of a completely particular and excessively versatile nature, remarkable for her spirit of duplicity, lying, and simulation. With an essential perverse nature, the hysteric seeks to fool those around her, in the same way that she has impulses that push her to steal, to falsely accuse, to set things on fire.

  An essential perverse nature: we are all liars, by definition.

  LIZZIE

  Strauss was nice about it, the next day—nice being the perfect, anodyne descriptor of his echt professional mien when he summoned her into his office, offered her the chair across from his imposing desk, said vaguely that everyone made mistakes. It was often easy to misinterpret things, he said, and as long as these mistakes went unrepeated, they could continue on as they had been. Lizzie nodded, chastened, slipped out without further discussion. An unrepeatable mistake, and now there were no more private lunches, no more late-night strolls, and when Lizzie arrived in his office for their weekly Wendy Doe update meeting, the first time she would be alone with him since the “mistake,” she found Mariana there, notebook open, posture ramrod, smiling as if it were totally normal for Strauss to have asked her to sit in. Always good to have a fresh brain on the case, he said. A week ago, Lizzie would have taken this as a sign of illicit desire—the idea that they might need a chaperone, that they should strive to maintain appearances—but she knew better now. He thought she needed a
chaperone, while he needed a guard dog.

  She wasn’t going to tell Gwen, but then she told Gwen.

  “It’s official,” Gwen said. “We hate him.”

  “We don’t hate him.” Lizzie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. She wasn’t sure when Gwen had become a person who knew how to select appropriate throw pillows, but it was useful for those conversations that required padding.

  “You don’t hate him because you’re lost in some kind of pheromonal brain fog. Thus the royal-we will hate him for the both of us.”

  This was the reason Lizzie had planned to keep the incident to herself. She knew Gwen would find a way to make the situation Strauss’s fault, and once Gwen deemed someone an enemy of the people, there was no going back. Which wouldn’t matter, Lizzie allowed herself to acknowledge, if some secret part of her didn’t nurture the hope that Strauss would remain a relevant factor in her future, the kind of factor you didn’t want your best friend to dislike.

  Stupid, Lizzie reminded herself. Pathetic. Humiliating. It didn’t help.

  “I’m the one who kissed him,” Lizzie said. “I’m the inappropriate idiot. I’m the crazy one. He’s the one acting like a normal person. Or not even, because a normal person would probably fire me.”

  Gwen set the baby in her lap, very gently, just long enough to launch a throw pillow at Lizzie’s head. “This is what I’m talking about! How is this your fault? Fuck this guy.”

  Lizzie sighed. “One more time, in single syllables. I. Kissed. Him.”

  “Only because he’s been completely inappropriate with you from day one. All your little midnight ‘talks’? All that shit about how his poor wife doesn’t understand him? It’s like he gave you an engraved invitation to fuck him, and then when you try to accept, he has the nerve to make you think you’re crazy?”

  “Forget it,” Lizzie said. “You don’t get it. You’re—” She waved toward the baby, the color-coordinated embroidered throw pillows, the Hallmark life they embodied.

  “Okay, maybe. So explain it. What is it with this guy?”

  “It’s not him,” Lizzie said. “Or, I don’t know, it’s not just him. I know I can’t have him—I don’t even want to, he’s fucking married.”

  Gwen laughed. “Like that’s ever stopped any man in the history of time.”

  “He’s always telling me I have the capacity to be extraordinary,” she said. “And when I’m with him, when I’m seen by him, it’s like I can actually believe it. He makes me feel like I can be someone new. Does that make sense?”

  Gwen at least pretended to consider the question, then: “No. You already are extraordinary. I don’t like that he’s got you thinking you need some big transformation—into what? Whoever he wants you to be?”

  “Into someone who takes some risks, maybe? I guess, since I met him, I’ve been thinking…” It was the last thing she wanted to admit to Gwen, of all people, but Lizzie reminded herself that Gwen, of all people, was the person she was supposed to admit everything to. “Maybe the reason I don’t have anything is because I never let myself reach for anything?”

  “How do you not have anything? You have this huge fancy fellowship, for one.”

  “Yeah—because I pretended to be a completely different person in the application. The kind of person who actually has the nerve to say what she wants and go for it.” Lizzie didn’t know how to explain it to Gwen, who always had whatever she wanted, or at least accommodated herself to wanting only what she could have. Who was someone else’s most important person; who could go to sleep each night held by someone who believed she was special. The math they could never discuss: Gwen’s addition of husband and baby had been a subtraction for Lizzie. She wanted to be someone’s priority, too. She knew this was childish. She knew equally that it was ridiculous to imagine getting this from a man who had a wife and child. But it didn’t change the fact that she wanted. “I’m not saying I should have kissed him, okay? That was a mistake, but is that the kind of idiot mistake you’ve ever known me to make?”

  “No, that’s my point.”

  “And that’s my point,” Lizzie said. “Being who I am isn’t working. Is it such a bad idea to try being someone else?”

  * * *

  Lizzie’s mother’s boyfriend’s assistant producer had a stringy goatee and a girl’s name. He also had a faintly horsey smell. Or maybe that was just the odor called woodsy, which she had only ever before encountered in Body Shop samplers. Jody liked camping. He liked cities, but found suburbs constrictive. They’d competed in the same high school debate league.

  This is good, she told herself. You can work with this.

  She had promised Gwen she would at least try.

  The bar was Jody’s choice, a tasteful one. Its wine menu was twelve pages long. Each bottle came with a recommended cheese pairing. She’d let him order for both of them. She worried this was false advertising, but Gwen had told her once that first dates were all about soft edges, implied accommodation. No one wants to fuck the captain of the debate team, Gwen told her in high school. Gwen was the president of the honor society, and no one wanted to fuck her, either.

  “Eugene’s been talking you up forever,” Jody said. “I admit, I’m kind of surprised you turned out to be so…”

  Lizzie waited.

  “Un-Eugene-like?”

  Lizzie gave him the laugh. “Same.”

  When he reached for the bottle to top off their glasses, his hand brushed hers, lingered. She told herself to let it.

  “What’s it like working for him?”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “I try very hard not to know anyone who gets to see my mother naked.”

  He laughed. He liked her, she could tell.

  “Working for him is like working for a mildly bright toddler.”

  This time, when Lizzie laughed for him, she forced herself to touch his knee.

  The relevant statistics: Jody had a degree in communications from Penn and had started in the TV world before shifting to radio, an industry he loved all the more for its terminal condition. He dreamed of NPR, which she pretended she also enjoyed. He was not and had never been married. He rooted for the Eagles, but mildly. His favorite author was Murakami. He read Chomsky. He was two years out of a failed engagement, he was one year older than Lizzie, he was neither her employer nor married, and so wholly appropriate.

  What are you holding out for, Gwen would have said. It’s like you want to be alone.

  She told him about her research and he said autonoetic consciousness sounded dirty. Then he suggested they stop talking about work. “Let’s talk about something interesting.”

  She told herself not to judge him for it.

  On the third glass, after she told him how much she missed freeways, sculptured cement slicing sky, she found his hand on her thigh.

  “You’re adorable,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “I really need to kiss you,” he said.

  She was embarrassed for him, the need that seemed so obviously misplaced.

  “No one’s stopping you,” she said, and this was true, so he leaned across the table and kissed her. It was wet. He palmed her head, pressed her closer. Her brain took notes. Note how he rubs his hand down your calf, note how his tongue tastes of honey and jam. Note how his face Picassos when you open your eyes.

  Lizzie pulled away. “It’s maybe a little too well lit for this?”

  “My apartment’s only a few blocks away. Much better lighting.”

  She knew, once they were outside and he hooked an arm around her shoulders, that she should not have agreed, but to renege now demanded a breach in etiquette that felt beyond her. How did one say, I thought I could make myself want you, but I see now I was wrong?

  She told herself to take it as a learning experience. She had never gone back to a man’s apartment on a first date. She had never stripped for anyone she barely knew and didn’t want. If she wanted to be a grown-up, a single woman in the grown-up
single-woman dating world, maybe this was a necessary stage, the undiscriminating one.

  And Jody could be a boyfriend, she thought. She could go over to his apartment after work. They could cook spaghetti together, watch reality TV. He could join her at dinners with her mother, and she would be someone’s partner rather than someone’s child. She didn’t need a true love, just a boyfriend. Technically she didn’t even need a boyfriend. She needed a reminder of what she was supposed to want.

  It didn’t matter anyway, because Jody was taking off her shirt and kissing her nipples and she was too embarrassed by his need and her lack to do anything but let him. Maybe he didn’t notice her stiffen as his hands traveled down. Maybe he couldn’t tell how dry she was, though she was. Sandpaper. Desert. Maybe he couldn’t tell from the look on her face how much it hurt. He wasn’t looking at her face.

  This is good for me, she thought.

  She allowed herself the duration of the taxi ride for tears. She had made this happen, so it wasn’t fair to feel like it had happened to her. In the morning, she would narrate it for Gwen as entertaining anecdote, emphasis on stupid girl’s name and stupider goatee. They would laugh. The taxi rolled to another stop, honked the horn. There was more traffic than there should have been. It felt like a gift. Lizzie opened the window and let in the night.

  VII

  WENDY

  Post-trauma

  The best anonymous group is the PTSD group that meets Monday nights, in the basement of a church. A stained glass Jesus watches from the wall, his abs distractingly well defined. There is always a plate of doughnuts by the coffee. The members of this group are addicted to their own pasts. They cannot stop remembering. They dream. They hear voices in silence. They imagine their trauma into their post-. They panic. They weep. They hurt.

  One Monday night, Dr. Strauss was waiting for me when the meeting closed. He followed me to the church, he said. My religious turn had piqued his curiosity. This, he said, makes more sense.