Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  “Why would I want that?”

  “I just assumed—”

  “I get my memories back, I snap out of this fugue thing, and I forget any of this ever happened, that’s how it works, right?” The patient turned again to Strauss, who nodded.

  “Traditionally.”

  “Why would I be eager to erase myself? Does that seem like something you’d want?” This she directed at Lizzie, who shook her head, though it was impossible for her to imagine wanting to live without a past—impossible to imagine there would be a her without it. Maybe that was Wendy Doe’s point.

  Once back in the car, Strauss asked what she thought.

  “Of the case?” Lizzie scrambled to remember what she knew of dissociative fugues. “The patient shows no obvious signs of emotional trauma, but—”

  “No, of the subject. She’s yours, if you want her. Well, yours and mine, but I’m assuming you don’t mind a bit of supervision.”

  “I do rats,” Lizzie said, stalling, panicking.

  “Indeed, you did. I know this because I read your application. Do you know what else I read there? A stated desire to, quote, blaze beyond the boundaries of pedestrian scientific inquiry and chart a revolutionary course.”

  She cringed at the echo of her own absurd ambition.

  “Did you mean that?”

  Lizzie nodded, because absurd or not, it was also true.

  “Do you think you’re going to do that by reanimating your rat project?”

  “Am I going to do it by assisting you, and studying a woman who could get her memory back any minute, sending us smack into a dead end?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s a risk. She could also refuse to be studied—unlike your rats. Or some relative could dig her up. She could turn out to be faking it. Anything’s possible.”

  She flipped through the file, stalling. According to the records, Peter Pan’s lost girl had bounced around city facilities for nearly a month. First a hospital, then a mental hospital, a homeless shelter, the mental hospital again, while social services waited for someone to come looking. The Philadelphia PD, the FBI, the reporters at the Inquirer and (more dogged when it came to this brand of tawdry) the Daily News, all had failed to turn up a viable claimant. Maybe forgetting her life was simple retaliation, Lizzie thought. Maybe life forgot her first.

  “Or we could hit the lottery,” Strauss said. “Discover something no one else knows. Together.”

  There was no way to calculate the odds without a firmer grip on the subject’s status, and there were two equally viable possibilities: One, Wendy Doe was lying. Remembered everything, walked out of her life for reasons valid or otherwise. Two: Wendy Doe genuinely remembered nothing. She was a walking dream state, and whatever happened to her now, the things she said, the choices she made, would simply evanesce when she woke up. If Wendy Doe was telling the truth, there was no Wendy Doe.

  “You know what I saw in your application?”

  “What?”

  “Someone who wants to be exceptional, but doesn’t quite believe she has it in her. Someone too invested in the past, too worried about the future, to take a true risk in the present. Someone who’s realized her life is small and wants to change that.”

  “You read all that in my application?”

  “I read all that in the first five minutes of meeting you. I’m a very insightful man. Maybe you’ve heard.” He grinned, boyish, and she couldn’t help liking it. “Take the night, think about it. If, in the morning, you still want rats, then rats ye shall have.”

  “For the record, I’m not here to start a new life,” she said. “Just a new research project.”

  “Hmm.” It sounded diagnostic. “Have you ever been in love, Elizabeth?”

  “What?”

  “Is that an inappropriate question these days?” Wendy Doe’s file sat on the dashboard. He rapped a fist against it, twice. “My advice? Find something here that you love to the exclusion of all else. I can see how sincerely you want to want this. That’s good. Want it for real. That’s better.”

  * * *

  The house still felt like her father’s house. Here was the crooked magnolia in the yard, the only tree halfway suitable for climbing. Here was the mezuzah, chastising her for never acquiring one of her own. Here was a welcome mat, unwelcome touch that her father—for reasons both aesthetic and constitutional—would never have allowed. She had a key, but rang the bell anyway, a reminder she was technically a guest here. She did not have to stay.

  Her mother was draped in a lavender caftan and had eyeshadow to match. They exchanged a polite hug. The house smelled ineffably of Epstein.

  Lizzie’s sister’s room was now an office; Lizzie’s room was a guest bedroom. Before that, it had been her father’s sickroom, where he slept in a rented hospital bed as Lizzie’s mother nursed her ex-husband to his end. The bed had been replaced. Lizzie unpacked, then lay on the nubby carpet, looking up at his last view. The ceiling was the same ceiling. She was not there when he died. She was in her dorm, arguing with her roommates about which of them had promised—then forgotten—to pay the phone bill. The line still worked, but the phone did not ring, so Lizzie spent four superfluous hours believing she still had a father. She tossed a Frisbee with the boys who lived upstairs. And her father was dead. She invented an excuse to walk one of those boys, the one who wore suspenders just ridiculous enough to appeal, down into the Widener stacks, trying not to be too obvious discerning how and in whom he planned to spend his Saturday night. And her father was dead. She had Lucky Charms with frozen yogurt for dinner. She walked home with her roommates, arms linked, and she was laughing, and her father was dead.

  For their first dinner together at home in four years, Lizzie and her mother ordered steak sandwiches. These arrived cold, and were not as good as Lizzie remembered. The table sat four. Her mother took her father’s chair.

  “So, how’s your Christian Scientist?”

  “Mom, Lucas is not—”

  “Is he still a scientist?”

  She nodded.

  “Still a WASP?”

  “He’s Catholic.”

  “Well then.”

  Lizzie reminded herself it was no longer her obligation to defend her boyfriend, now ex. “How’s Eugene?” she countered. When Lizzie was a child, Eugene Stein had been a professionally indignant voice on the radio and a family joke. Now he was having presumably frequent sex with Lizzie’s mother in Lizzie’s father’s bedroom.

  “Tiresome.” But her smile was unmistakably fond. “There’s a new producer at the station we thought you might like, especially if you and the Christian Scientist are—”

  Lizzie said she’d rather die alone and be eaten by cats, but thanks anyway.

  They ate their cold sandwiches, their soggy fries. Her mother asked after Gwen, Lizzie’s oldest friend, best friend, only friend left within the city limits. She had seemed like enough from three thousand miles away but—judging from Lizzie’s failed efforts to spend this first evening with a friend rather than family—Gwen’s new baby, and the logistical constraints she imposed, meant it would not be. Lizzie let her mother believe this first meal at home had been her first choice. Her mother asked about her day at the Meadowlark. Hewing to long-standing policy, Lizzie offered no details of her work. Other subjects more mutually avoided: politics (especially what Lizzie’s mother referred to as Lizzie’s radicalization). Israel (especially since the advent of Eugene, when her mother had gone what Lucas called “the full Zionist”). Her mother’s long-ago affair, her parents’ divorce. Her father’s illness, her father’s death. Her father’s will, deeding the house to her mother. Her father, period. Instead they lingered on the plummeting life trajectories of old enemies, the tedium of Lizzie’s sister’s updates on her four children—remarkable, in Lizzie’s opinion, only as living proof that Lizzie’s sister had endured at least four encounters with her husband’s presumably unfortunate penis. They discussed the physical ailments of elderly relatives. The vi
cissitudes of the local restaurant scene (two Chinese places closing, one opening, the seafood place supposedly ridden with botulism, the Baskin-Robbins giving way to a TCBY, and of course, the Godot-like Cheesecake Factory, for which the suburban masses steadfastly continued to wait). The president’s genitals, and where he might or might not have inserted them.

  The last time Lizzie came for a visit, her mother had been dating a therapist and wanted to talk about feelings. Specifically, she wanted to talk about Lizzie’s feeling like she had been abandoned by her mother, back when her mother abandoned her. I’m sorry you felt that way, she’d told Lizzie, who felt this was not an actual apology.

  Now: “I’m selling the house.”

  “You are not!”

  “You’re not a child anymore, Lizzie. Don’t act like one.”

  In a seminar on addiction, Lizzie had learned the theory that addicts are often emotionally stunted, frozen at the age they first encountered their substance of choice. She wondered if she was addicted to blaming her mother. “You can’t sell his house.”

  “It’s not his house anymore.” Lizzie’s mother stood at the sink, rinsing the plates far more thoroughly than needed. Even when the meal came from a paper bag, her mother believed in china plates, silver silverware, glass glasses. Civilization was in the details. She turned off the water but stayed where she was, her back to Lizzie, palms on the counter, holding on.

  Lizzie was fifteen when her mother fucked, then fell for, the dermatologist who worked down the hall from her orthodontia practice. She left her husband for him and when, reneging on their plans, he elected to keep his wife, Lizzie’s mother stayed gone. Within four years, Lizzie’s sister had found God, moved to Jerusalem, married a Talmud student, and gotten knocked up with twins. Lizzie’s mother had started dating a yoga instructor and learning German. Lizzie’s father had died. Then there was only Lizzie left. She thought now about those first few nights, when she’d still assumed her mother would come home, and had still welcomed the thought of it. She thought about Wendy Doe, and the family who might be out there searching for her, the life or lack thereof that the amnesic woman had abandoned. She thought, mostly, about how easily she’d slipped out of her own life in Los Angeles, as easily as, several years before, she’d slipped from the one here; how inessential she’d discovered herself to be. How, if she one day got on a bus and left, there would be no one to feel left behind.

  Lizzie’s mother told her the house wouldn’t go on the market till April, which gave her nearly six months to pack up whatever she wanted of her things, and of her father’s. Lizzie wanted to say she wanted none of it. But she wanted everything. She wanted the house and its contents. She wanted a life-sized replica of her past. She wanted every sock and tie her father had worn, every meal they’d cooked together, every show they’d watched, every time he’d put his arms around her and made life, for that moment, tolerable. She wanted her stuffed animals, she wanted her yellow blanket, she wanted her Wonder Woman PJs, she wanted her things and her belief that things could save her. She wanted so much more than this life she’d made for herself could hold.

  ALICE

  When Alice finally left, she took the bus, and she did so because when her mother left, she took the bus—this was the one thing Alice knew for sure. It was also the one thing to convince Alice that her mother had lost her mind. Travel by bus implied no other option, and Alice’s mother was recourse rich: driver’s license, Honda SUV, credit limit expansive enough to cover a plane or train ticket to wherever she wanted to go, not to mention a perfectly nice life in a perfectly nice three-bedroom, two-bath, below-market split-level that should have precluded her desire to go anywhere. Her mother, or at least the person her mother had spent a lifetime persuasively pretending to be, would never have boarded a midnight bus bound for a city that held nothing for her but bad memories. And yet she had, so Alice did, splurged on a taxi from her dorm room to the bus terminal. Chicago’s central train station, only a few blocks away, was a Beaux Arts wonder, its architecture admonition: nowhere is better than here. The bus station, a utilitarian warehouse of crumbling brick and dingy tile, was more an invitation to flee. Alice fled. Boarded a bus to Indiana, where she transferred to the line that would carry her to Pittsburgh, transferred again, veered east, was startled awake at dawn to discover pinking farmland smearing past the window and her seatmate draping his coat across her lap, tucking her in.

  “My wife gave me a divorce for Christmas,” he said, mouth too close. The bus was all sweat and snoring, no one to see. Alice shrugged off the coat, inched away, imagined bedbugs burrowing into her denim. She had to pee. She could not pee. It was too easy to envision herself hovering over a clogged toilet behind a broken lock, the man’s face leering from the doorway. His grubby hand over her mouth. His fingers slipping down and down, his nails scrabbling at her belt, her zipper, her polka-dotted panties. This was Pavlovian, her mother’s fault. These were precisely the circumstances her mother had trained her to avoid. Dirty places with dirty men who wanted to do dirty things, and would, if you were careless enough to let them. Alice hunched her back to the man, kissed forehead to window, counted fences and cows and minutes, waited out his attention and her panic, blamed her mother, whose fault it was that she’d boarded this bus in the first place, whose insistence on the necessity of preparation had somehow prepared Alice for little more than being afraid.

  Alice’s mother was the kind of woman who carried antiseptic wipes on her person at all times and discreetly wiped down silverware when her waiter wasn’t looking. She believed life rewarded caution; the reckless would suffer. She believed in the assignment of blame. Alice’s father insisted her mother was more delicate than she appeared, but this defied belief. Everything about her mother was ironclad, not least her self-imposed regulations. She did not abdicate duty; she did not venture. She did not tolerate or transgress or risk—would not, could not, until one day, she did.

  * * *

  Here is how Alice lost her mother. The night of graduation, she intended to finally fuck her boyfriend. This was not how he put it, of course. Daniel wasn’t the fucking type. Neither, as was evident to everyone other than her mother, was Alice. They were good kids, everyone said so. She read to the blind, edited the student activities section of the yearbook; he cochaired the honor society, played lacrosse, raised money for disaster relief. While it was true he sometimes sucked at her nipples in his parents’ basement and she had perfected the requisite pacing and grip to make him groan, their desire always remained responsibly bridled. The pack of condoms secreted inside Alice’s old tennis shoe had been purchased less for precaution than principle. It was her mother’s refusal to believe this, her mother’s hysterical insistence on her catastrophic deflowering, that left Alice determined to prove her right.

  Graduation night. They let themselves into the garage apartment Daniel had borrowed from his cousin’s best friend and found a flavored-for-her-pleasure condom taped to a helium balloon. The balloon said Congratulations, and Daniel said, “My cousin is such an asshole” and also “quack-quack,” because their relationship had bloomed from a fifth-grade crush that was itself incited by his impressive Donald Duck impression, and this was now their way of saying I love you. This was the kind of couple they were, and even in the presence of Daniel’s abruptly unveiled genitals, this was perhaps inescapable.

  She wanted to be the daughter who channeled rebellion into recklessness, threw her lover down on the bed in a haze of passion and spite. Desire would overpower pregnancy paranoia and the images of decaying STD-stricken skin that her mother’s PowerPoint presentation had embedded in her brain. But Daniel was gentle, Daniel was tentative, Daniel was, ultimately, not equipped to be the faceless avatar of testosterone-fueled destruction that her mother imagined him to be, but simply Daniel, who quacked his love for her, who wanted to be sure she was ready, and if he was Daniel then she could be no one but Alice, who was not.

  She imagined later that if instead of spendin
g the night in Daniel’s disappointed arms she had ceded her virginity as planned and snuck home before dawn, she might have caught her mother mid–disappearing act. She even wondered afterward if catching her mother wouldn’t have been necessary—if the pop of hymen might have pinged some maternal radar, alerted her mother to pressing need. Made her stay. Instead, Alice let a deflated Daniel spoon her to sleep, and when she got home in the morning, her mother was gone.

  * * *

  The first true thing she knew about her mother was the leaving. Her mother getting on a bus, her mother carried away.

  The last true thing she knew was the bridge fifty miles from their house, the dirt niche by the foot of it where they found her mother’s neatly folded coat and both her shoes.

  Everyone seemed very certain they could extrapolate what happened next. Alice didn’t argue.

  Let them drag the river. Let them scour security footage. Let them believe in a body. Alice believed in the leaving. She didn’t need a body, drowned or dry, to know she’d been left.

  * * *

  July, no mother. August, no mother. She doesn’t break up with Daniel, though sometimes she wants to. He doesn’t break up with her, because who would break up with the girl whose mother is gone? They have arguments sometimes about why she doesn’t trust him enough to cry. He doesn’t believe her when she says she doesn’t cry at all. He remains tragically unfucked.

  She is alone.

  She lies to her father and lets him believe she thinks her mother is dead. She lies to her friends, who are really Daniel’s friends, when they invite her along, once it becomes clear they don’t want her along. They want to lounge along Boulder Lake and worry about their tans, their future roommates, their fake IDs, their soon-to-be long-distance loves, their ever-insufficient supply of beer. She reminds herself this was always meant to be a summer of leaving.