Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  WENDY

  How he looks at me

  Like I’m a car that won’t start, and if he opens the hood, examines every valve and piston, he’ll find the problem.

  Like I’m an insect pinned in place, and if he angles the magnifying glass just right, he’ll watch me burn.

  Like I’m a piece of furniture, without will or consequence.

  Like I’m a mosquito bite, begging, scratch me, please. Like I’m a mountain, and he wants to climb me. Like I’m a dog, and—it’s a miracle!—I can speak.

  How he looked at me when we met: like I was human.

  Everyone before him had treated me as a set of problems to be handled. A thing, broken. Everyone before him would say, Now I’m going to check your blood pressure or now I’m going to take an X-ray or now I’m going to insert the speculum, now you’re going to feel the pinch. No one asking my permission, only narrating my future on my behalf.

  There was something about the way he said my name, as if it was a name rather than a label. It made me feel newly real, and I thought, am I the kind of woman who needs someone else’s permission to believe in my own existence?

  I had by then been this woman, in this body, for a month. Hospital first. Mental hospital, worse. Then women’s shelter, two nights, then the third night when I couldn’t stop crying. These tears were happening to me. I was not making them happen. I was calm—but only in a secret inner corner no one else could see. The body made its noisy fuss and was carted back to the hospital, a pill forced down its throat, and soon the body was as calm as I was, and we both fell asleep. When we woke up, the body was strapped down. It screamed.

  Time floated. I swallowed more pills. The pills made a fog. Sometimes I talked to myself, to see if my voice would sound as far away as everything else.

  His voice didn’t slice through the fog so much as dissipate it. He painted two pictures for me. First, the Wendy Doe who stayed in the hospital. Not for long, he said. The bed cost money, the oversalted soup cost money, the state could find cheaper ways to house me, and would—back to the shelter, then, or maybe the street. “You’re not a prisoner,” he said. “They can’t keep you, and trust me, they don’t want to.” This Wendy Doe had no means of legal employment and no claim to unemployment or disability or any other official payout from the state, because in the state’s eyes, Wendy Doe did not exist.

  In the second picture, he said, I would have a room of my own. A bed, food, an allowance, freedom to do as I liked, for as long as I liked. I only needed to agree to let myself be studied. He said we would be collaborators. “Spelunkers,” he said. “Exploring the mysteries of your mind.” He called me a fascinating case. He said he monitored the news for possible subjects, but I was the first in months he’d deemed worthy of further study. I asked if he thought he could help me remember. He asked if I wanted him to.

  “No.” I liked that he seemed unsurprised.

  “Good,” he said. “Frankly, you’re of no use to us once you get your memories back.”

  I liked that, too.

  I wanted to be a spelunker of my own mind. Maybe I was the kind of woman with a thirst for knowledge, I thought. Or maybe I was the kind of woman who would shape myself into what this man wanted me to be.

  “Let’s achieve greatness together,” he said. Maybe it was a lie, him looking at me like I was a person, but I don’t think so. I think I was real to him then, for the last time. A real person is someone who can choose, even if she’s choosing to give her choices away. A real person can say no or she can say yes.

  I said yes.

  LIZZIE

  It wasn’t all paperwork. Wendy Doe had no source of income but the largesse of Strauss, who was happy enough to extend it as long as Lizzie governed its use. Absolute freedom to come and go as she liked, but if she would like to go anywhere requiring a vehicle, Lizzie was her ride. It left Lizzie feeling part chaperone, part lady-in-waiting, part probation officer, and left Wendy feeling resentment she didn’t bother to disguise. It also meant Lizzie could spend an afternoon at the mall or the movies on the institute’s dime, and count it as work. Today’s mission: new clothes, enough to replace the shapeless, missized hand-me-downs Wendy had accumulated in her month bouncing between state institutions. Maybe she would feel less like a mental patient, Wendy said, if she had some better jeans.

  “I feel like I’m in a very downscale Pretty Woman,” Lizzie said from her corner of the dressing room as Wendy extricated herself from a strappy pleather tank top and buttoned herself into a conservative chambray shirt. “Or any rom-com ever, I guess.” They’d been in the department store for two hours, as Wendy sampled one sartorial self after another: punk, goth, grunge, girly, high fashion, tomboy, comfortable and un-, glaring, with each costume change, at her reflection, as if daring it to weigh in—to indicate that Wendy had finally hit on a stylistic manifestation of her abandoned essential self. Now Wendy ripped off the button-down, pulled on a sweater the color of a sunset.

  She spun slowly in front of the mirror. “This would look better on you.”

  “I was just thinking that.”

  “So buy it.”

  Lizzie shook her head. The stipend she got from the Meadowlark wasn’t insignificant, especially given that she was currently living rent-free, but the complications of said rent-free lodgings weren’t insignificant, either. Lizzie was hoarding every dollar she made for an eventual sublet and the freedom from maternal oversight it would ensure.

  “Then how about we let the Meadowlark buy it for you?” Wendy suggested.

  Lizzie eyed the price tag, winced, and told Wendy the clothing allowance she’d been given was for Wendy alone.

  “Have you ever met a rule you didn’t blindly follow?” Wendy asked.

  “I don’t blindly follow anything.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wendy exchanged a grin with her reflection, then put on the coat they’d bought earlier that day and began buttoning it over the sweater.

  “What are you doing?” Lizzie whispered.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “I’m sure there are cameras in here.”

  Wendy shrugged. “What can they do, arrest me? You think jail would be that much different from the institute?”

  “Yeah. Actually, I do.”

  Wendy looked at her carefully, then laughed. “Oh, I get it.”

  “What?”

  “You want me to. It’s the closest you can get to scratching the itch. Pleasuring your inner delinquent.”

  “Bullshit.” But Lizzie remembered an afternoon with Gwen, half her lifetime ago, an aging drugstore attendant, an overpriced lipstick, a halfhearted effort to dissuade, and Gwen’s diagnosis as she pressed the stolen lipstick into Lizzie’s palm, Lizzie’s fingers closing over the cool plastic, Lizzie’s pulse, quickened. Gwen’s theory that Lizzie needed this, the safety of moral superiority sprinkled with the rewards of vice. Fifteen years had passed. Gwen had transformed herself into a wife, a mother—was it possible that Lizzie was still exactly, pathetically the same?

  Wendy stepped out of the dressing room. “You coming? Or you telling?” She walked casually to the exit, then through it, and when no sirens attended her departure, Lizzie followed.

  Wendy had been at the Meadowlark for three weeks, mired in her fugue for seven, and there was still no indication as to where—or who—she’d been before that. Wendy made it clear she resolutely didn’t care. Lizzie, on the other hand, was consumed by speculation. The better she got to know Wendy—if you could be said to know a person whose personality was about as stable as a weather system—the more she wondered. Who was this woman before? Did she seem like someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s teacher, someone’s killer? Was this woman she was now, or was in the process of becoming, consistent with that past self, at odds with it, or something in between? And who was looking for her—was it out of love or hate, was it desperate or despairing, had they given up, and if not, where were they, and if there was no they, then why? />
  These were not questions Wendy had any interest in. She didn’t give a shit, she said, about the woman she’d been, the one who’d abandoned her body to Wendy’s occupancy like a reckless homeowner leaving the door wide open on her way out. In the absence of personal history, Wendy had developed an interest—a fixation, Strauss called it—in the Meadowlark’s history, specifically the female patients who had come before. She took long walks in the graveyard at the edge of the Meadowlark woods, and when Lizzie joined her, Wendy narrated imagined lives for the women buried there. Lizzie had asked why she was so willing to speculate about these strangers’ pasts but never her own, but Wendy said it wasn’t their pasts that interested her. It was the eternal present they’d lived within the asylum walls, cut off from whoever they’d been or might have become, spending decades, some of them, tended to by demons internal and external. Endlessly treated, never cured. “You’re not a mental patient,” Lizzie reminded her. “This is no longer an asylum. You’re not one of them.” She said it to comfort. Wendy didn’t want comfort, at least not from Lizzie; she took it from the women, she said, from the bodies in the ground and the ghosts in the walls. In this place, she said, in this eternal present, she never felt alone.

  It was the kind of crisp fall day that demanded apple orchards and hayrides, sun glinting off gloriously dying leaves, and they lingered in the Meadowlark parking lot, nowhere to go and in no hurry to go inside. Wendy wriggled out of the stolen sweater, offered it to Lizzie—unless, she teased, Lizzie was afraid of receiving stolen property—and Lizzie took it. The wool was impossibly soft.

  “You love it,” Wendy said.

  “I love it.”

  Wendy looked to the sky with exaggerated alarm.

  “What?”

  “Just waiting to see if you get struck by lightning for admitting it. There’s always got to be a consequence, right?”

  “Fuck off,” Lizzie said, as she would to an actual friend, and when Wendy pulled out a pack of cigarettes—probably also stolen, Lizzie realized—she didn’t stop the subject from lighting up.

  “You think he’s attractive?” Wendy said. “Dr. Strauss?”

  “I never thought about it. Why?”

  “Just free associating, your favorite. I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I can’t tell—he looks too much like himself, you know?”

  Lizzie did know.

  “There’s something about him, though,” Wendy said. “Like he’s a little more… I don’t know, awake than most people?”

  Lizzie knew that, too. “I’m not sure you should be smoking.”

  “By the time the body gets lung cancer, I’ll be long gone, so…” Wendy took a long drag, coughed, tried again. Offered it to Lizzie, who shook her head. “You keep telling me I’m someone’s imaginary friend, and one day I’m going to vaporize. So why not try everything? Risk anything? What do I care what happens to the body?”

  Lizzie had once briefly toyed with the idea of studying developmental psychology—she’d never much liked children, but she did love the idea of them as natural-born physicists, the theory that babies began life as miniature Aristotelians and only by trial and error discovered Galilean inertia and Newtonian motion, every toddler a live-action Wile E. Coyote, running off the cliff and learning gravity on the way down. It occurred to her now to imagine a moral philosophy taking shape in the same way, baby Hobbeses and little Lockes bumping into sin and consequence. Wendy had experienced neither yet; she had begun this life with literally nothing left to lose. Why not expect her to do anything, risk anything, at least until she’d acquired something of value, then been forced to suffer its absence?

  “Everyone’s life is temporary in the long run,” Lizzie said. “By your logic, anybody has permission to do anything.”

  “Now you’re hearing me.” Wendy stubbed out the cigarette, tucked the pack into her pocket, suggested, with only a slight ironic twist on the operative word, that they go home.

  * * *

  “What if we’re studying the wrong thing?” Lizzie asked Strauss that night when he wandered into her office. He did that a lot—he liked to work late, liked the shadowy quiet in the wake of the day’s bustle, often left to put his daughter to bed then came back to the Meadowlark, concentrated best, he said, in the moonlight dark. She said she did, too, and that had once been true but no longer was, because now, when the building emptied and sun abandoned sky, she could only ever half focus on the page in front of her, the other half of her attuned to the hallway, waiting for the sound of his footsteps. He liked to stroll his corridors, he said. He liked to lean in her doorway—not that there was much other option, as the office was barely big enough to fit desk, chair, and Lizzie. Sometimes he stopped in to check on her latest results; sometimes he raced in with promising results of his own, or, her favorite times, with a question for her, a need to bounce around an idea—as if Lizzie was a peer who could sufficiently bounce it back. Some nights he would invite her to walk with him, and they would talk.

  They talked about his father, who’d died when he was a teenager, without offering any indication that Strauss had satisfied him or ever would. Isaac Strauss was a Viennese Jew, born into an empire and shaped by its wreckage. Supposed to be a great man, Strauss said, a physicist or a philosopher—then he blinked, and the world ended. Blinked again, and he was shaved and starved and marched away from his wife and sons, left for dead in a ditch, one more blink and there he was with a job as a bookkeeper, a new wife who spoke Russian, an American son who spoke only English, and a row house in, talk about mortal insults, Germantown. And he was told to be grateful, Strauss said, to think, there but for the grace of fucking God, so what kind of father could I expect him to be? They talked about his marriage and its evolution, the extraordinary turned ordinary by time and habit and—much as Strauss hated to admit it but, always the empiricist, could not deny—child rearing, his wife turned into his daughter’s mother and Strauss, loving them both, feeling if not left behind, then left alone. He wanted to be a good father, he said, and a good husband, and a good man; he wanted to be a great scientist; he worried, he said, that these were not reconcilable goals.

  She told him about LA, and what she missed. About Lucas, and what she didn’t. Strauss said it sounded like he wasn’t smart enough for Lizzie, and resented her for figuring this out. Strauss gave her the name of the Bach piece his father had loved, and that weekend she rooted through Tower Records until she found it. Strauss showed her a picture of his four-year-old, and admitted he was afraid of what damage might be wrought; he knew too much about the developing brain, too much about fatherhood and its flaws.

  She had discovered the institute was less Strauss’s brainchild than a physical manifestation of his neural map: he did not think like normal people, in straight lines and demarcated zones. He wandered in strange loops from quantum physics to music to geopolitics to the nature of the soul to, inevitably and always, the mind and its memory, which for him was not one subject but all subjects. He had a perfect ear for pitch, but could not remember the sound of his father’s voice; he wanted to know why. He wanted to know everything, like she did, but laughed when she said so. He believed, he said, in the quixotic pleasures of the asymptote. If he wanted a solvable mystery, he’d be a physicist. She asked him what the point was, asking questions to which one didn’t expect an answer. Maybe you should be a physicist, he said.

  There was the night he burst in, buzzing with pleasure at some promising result, then caught a hint of something on her face, and asked her what was wrong. Nothing was wrong; nothing, at least, was the sum of what she intended anyone to know was wrong. She told him, nothing, and he asked if people generally believed her when she said so. People generally did. That sounds lonely, he said, and because he was right, because he was paying attention, she admitted it was her father’s birthday, the first she’d spent in his house since he’d died. He sat on her desk, flipped open a research journal. He said this was how he preferred to pass the night.

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nbsp; She woke up some mornings thinking of him. If he would come that night, and what she would say. This night, though, she only wanted to talk about work; she was bursting with it. She’d spent the hours since her shopping trip blasting through every recent journal article she could find on autonoetic consciousness—the capacity to imagine a self consistent over time, the conviction, or illusion, that there was such a thing, a cohesive consciousness rather than an ever-evolving constellation of experience and impulse. It was a foundational element of autobiographical memory, but there was little said about the reverse, the question of how autobiographical memory, that beaded string of experience and impulse, informed or—Lizzie’s nascent theory—formed the self. This was what she suggested, hesitantly, to Strauss. That studying Wendy’s nonexistent memories, or the mechanism that had purged them, was a dead end—that the untapped resource here was the nearly blank slate of the subject’s unformed ego.

  He was intrigued. She cited the hippocampal role in decision generation, name-checked Kahneman and Tversky, and Strauss, with gathering enthusiasm, threw in Damasio’s work on emotion and selfhood, and she said exactly, she wanted to do for memory what Damasio had done for feeling, recenter it as a keystone of consciousness. It was a perfect project for the Meadowlark’s integrative philosophy, he said, Wendy Doe as the nexus of a multidisciplinary attack on the construction of the conception of self. Stage one in the revolution, she said, and they were off, the ideas flying between them—brain image studies, dips into artificial intelligence, neurobiology, computational psych, a dab of philosophy and religious studies, all an eventual outgrowth of the primary project, one woman’s self-creation, the emergence of something from nothing in violation of natural law. It felt like a fever, both of them burning with the same flame. It felt like creation, ideas accreting like matter, like they were gods of an intellectual universe, bouncing a sun between them, its mass and luminosity swelling with each volley. She had never felt less self-conscious in his presence, more like her stripped-down self, the person she was when alone, only better.