Mother Daughter Widow Wife

A Novel

Robin Wasserman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982139513
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

*Finalist for the 2021 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction?* From the author of Girls on Fire comes a "sharp and soulful and ferociously insightful" (Leslie Jamison) novel centered around a woman with no memory, the scientists studying her, and the daughter who longs to understand. Wendy Doe is a woman with no past and no future. Without any memory of who she is, she's diagnosed with dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any moment—or never at all—and invited by Dr. Benjamin Strauss to submit herself for experimental observation at his Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research. With few better options, Wendy feels she has no choice.To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. To Strauss's ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, she's an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzie's own desires, and an invitation to wonder: once a woman is untethered from all past and present obligations of womanhood, who is she allowed to become?To Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so present it threatens to tear Alice's world apart. Through their attempts to untangle Wendy's identity—as well as her struggle to construct a new self—Wasserman has crafted an "artful meditation on memory and identity" ( The New York Times Book Review ) and a journey of discovery, reckoning, and reclamation. "A timely examination of memory, womanhood and power, " ( Time ) Mother Daughter Widow Wife will leave you "utterly riveted" ( BuzzFeed ).

I

WENDY

This body

This body is white. This body is female. This body bears no recent signs of penetration. This body has never given birth, but may or may not have incubated a fetus. This body offers no means of identification. This body bears the following distinguishing marks: Crescent scar behind left ear. Surgical scar along left calf. Mole on right breast, lower quadrant. No tattoos. Medical history: Healed fracture in each wrist. Three silver fillings. Mild scoliosis. O-positive blood. Cholesterol, average. Blood pressure, average. Nearsighted, mildly.

Emergency room intake records indicate severe dehydration. Bruising to shoulders and back consistent with a fall or a struggle. No physical indication of recent head injury. No evident physiological cause of amnesic state. CAT scan: inconclusive. MRI: inconclusive. Rape kit: inconclusive.

This body is uncoordinated. Its breasts have ghost nipples, pale and undersensitized. Its clitoris is small, but demanding. Its sinuses often hurt. Its eyes sting in the sun. It wants to sleep on its side, wrapped tight around something solid and warm. Its fingers are uncalloused; they do not work for their living. Its nails are ragged, its cuticles bloody. Its teeth are cared for, nutrition maintained. This body is not a temple, but it has been loved. You’d think someone would be looking for it.

LIZZIE

For all the obvious reasons, Lizzie preferred rats. Rats were adaptable and interchangeable, smart and cheap. Rats proffered no opinions, demanded no small talk. You could anesthetize a rat, pierce its skull, lesion its brain. Then euthanize, extract, examine: comprehend. Rats were explicable. This was their whole point. Damage had consequence; behavior had cause. Here was a material link between spirit and flesh. Here, in the humble rat, was obviation of soul and its god. It was, of course, also the case that if your rats inhabited a climate-controlled basement whose climate controls failed, not one of them would think to call 911 before the colony overheated. Rats were replaceable; two years of carefully cultivated genetic lines were not. Lizzie tried not to blame the rats, whose death had nearly capsized the carefully constructed ship of her career—but the rats were not here to defend themselves. It was easy, as she packed for her year in exile, to imagine a rat god visiting hell upon her, not just for the crate of tiny parboiled corpses, but for the indignities she’d visited upon their forefathers, all those rodent generations for whom Lizzie had played both grand inquisitor and executioner. Not that this was hell, she reminded herself. This was Philadelphia.

Lizzie Epstein, home at last. Suburbscape depressingly unchanged: same mediocre Chinese takeout, same ticky-tack split-levels, familiar flutter of rumors regarding a new high-end mall eatery, in this case, the long-awaited Cheesecake Factory. Illusory adult independence given way to shameful squat in her childhood bedroom. She had, after an efficient hygiene layover in the airport bathroom, arrived at orientation straight from her red-eye, granting herself one final day of avoiding her mother. Lizzie Epstein, reporting for duty at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research, cheeks still sun kissed with California glow, ass neatly pencil-skirted, rat-brown hair primly bunned, glasses wire rimmed and not strictly flattering, semisensible mules already blistering her feet. Here was her last, best chance, a wonder-stuffed Willy Wonka factory of world-class memory research, the fellowship packet in her bag a golden ticket. Four graduate students from across the country had been selected to spend a year exploiting the Meadowlark’s scientific opportunities and—of more practical pertinence—to spend the next several years of their academic careers coasting on that glory: genius by association. So what if she had never intended to return east, if she had screwed up her research and, as a consequence, the closest thing she’d had in years to a successful relationship? So what if it had brought her here, to the threshold of Benjamin Strauss’s Meadowlark Institute, to the chance to work beneath cognitive psychology’s latest golden god, to relaunch her research with the help of his infinite resources and reputation, publish something—anything—with her name tangentially linked to his, then return west in triumph, her academic destiny manifest?

That at least was the plan she’d hatched after several sleepless nights grieving her rats. By then, the Meadowlark application was due in only three days, its requirements draconian—not just the standard research proposal, faculty recommendations, CV, personal statement, but also work samples, analytic essays on recent developments in the field, peer review of an anonymous preprint, and an extensive questionnaire that seemed part IQ test, part personality test, all invasive. Lizzie knew all this because the body snoring beside her had spent the last three months talking of nothing else; Lucas had his heart set on the fellowship and, as the second-best student in the country’s second-best cognitive psychology department, he was convinced he had a shot. Lizzie, generally agreed to be the best student in the program—although they discussed this about as often as they discussed what it would mean for Lucas to move three thousand miles away, i.e., approximately never—had spent several boozy nights brainstorming with him how best to position himself to appeal to Benjamin Strauss’s infamously peculiar tastes. She’d proofed his application materials before he dropped them in the mail only a few days before. She understood later the mistake she’d made not telling him about her decision to apply, but at the time, there had seemed no point. Her dissertation was dead; she had no reason to believe that her slapdash statement—with its overconfident implications about what she could accomplish with the Meadowlark’s resources; its overwrought paean to the grand unified theories of the past; its coda disclosing secret ambition to be a Newton, a Darwin, a (forgive the shameless flattery, she wrote) Strauss—would work. She also had no reason to assume the boy who claimed to love her would be unable to do so once she won what he had lost, but maybe she’d assumed this anyway, because when it happened, she wasn’t surprised.

Not that he broke up with her when the acceptance letter arrived. Lucas was not, or at least refused to be seen as, that kind of guy. Nor was he the kind who would say to her face that it had been to her advantage that she was a woman, that academia was making it impossible to succeed as a white man; but he said it to enough of their friends to ensure it got back to her. They had plenty of sex that summer, though decreasingly so as she signed her sublease and shipped her boxes, serviced her car, curled up alone in bed while he stayed late at the lab, cried. Let’s see how things go, he said, whenever she brought up the future, which she also did decreasingly as summer burned on. It was breakup chicken: she swerved first. If that’s what you really want, he said, the week before she got on the plane. What she wanted was for him to arrive breathless at the gate, declare his inability to live without her. She would have boarded anyway—she was able to live without him—but still, that’s what she wanted.

So Lucas was in California, already—rumor had it—de facto domestic partners with a blond undergrad he’d picked up at a frat party, and Lizzie was here. The Meadowlark Institute: a multidisciplinary mutual embrace of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, biologists, neurologists. Every -ology with a defensible connection to memory research was represented, or could petition to be. The promotional materials she’d received with her fellowship acceptance leaned, unsurprisingly, on the metaphor of the brain: parallel processing, functional integration—this was demonstrably nature’s most efficient method of knowledge production, so why was science so intent on segregation? Why not attack a topic without observing absurd rules of engagement? Science, Strauss wrote, is not a boxing match. It’s a street fight. Lizzie didn’t know what the intellectual equivalent of brass knuckles would be, but she was prepared to use them.

The central building was a disorienting jumble of colonial brick and space-age fiberglass. Despite faithfully following the receptionist’s directions, Lizzie took several wrong turns before finding her way to the cavernous lecture hall where the other three fellows had already arrived. She introduced herself, trying not to make it too obvious that she distrusted strangers on general principle—and these particular strangers on the more specific one that they were, by default, her competition. Only one of them would earn the right to publish with Strauss. The other woman, ponytail yanked so tight it tugged at her eyebrows, made no such effort to disguise hostility. She gave Lizzie a brief nod, then crossed her arms over her sweatshirt’s rhinestoned Mickey Mouse, and returned her concentrated gaze to the empty podium at the front of the room. Lizzie didn’t need an introduction, she’d done her homework. This was Mariana Cruz, Rhodes scholar with two years at the National Institute of Mental Health and what Lizzie had to admit was an exciting theory about neuroregenerative stem cells. Dmitri Tarken, the AI expert and piano prodigy from MIT who had the kind of taffy-pulled height that looked unnatural and was compulsively bending his spindly fingers backward one by one, offered his name and asked whether she’d seen any sign of Strauss in the hall. Lizzie shook her head. The final fellow was identifiable by process of elimination—a process unnecessary, because Clay Weld III was a type Lizzie knew all too well from college, a prep school boy who’d been slightly too smart and skinny to snag a prom date but hit freshman year high on blue-blooded cockiness, daddy an alum, daddy’s daddy an alum, already set for a scotch date with daddy’s old roommate the dean. He was hot in an obvious, chiseled-jaw kind of way, although not as hot as he clearly believed. He studied primate sexuality, he told her. You don’t know sex, he added, until you’ve seen those hairy red asses in action.

“Strauss is always late,” Mariana said, sounding sullen. “I hear it’s his thing.”

“Probably fucking his secretary,” Clay said. “I hear that’s his thing.”

“That’s not respectful,” Dmitri said, but Lizzie suspected the disapproval was for her and Mariana’s benefit only. The bro look he shot Clay suggested the boys would pick up their speculation later.

They waited. They discussed their projects, or rather, the other three did while Lizzie evaded summarizing her rat massacre and subsequent blank slate. They exchanged gossip about Benjamin Strauss, his research, his habits, his hypothetical affairs, all of them—even Dmitri, once he read the room—trying to disguise their hero worship, pretending they weren’t vibrating at a higher frequency just knowing he was in the building. Lizzie was no exception: she’d worshipped Strauss from afar since undergrad. It didn’t seem quite real that Strauss himself, the Columbus of neural pathways, codeveloper of the Strauss-Furman measure for flashbulb-memory-imprinting, MacArthur Foundation–certified genius, boy wonder—only in academia could you still be considered a boy wonder at forty-four—was about to stride through the double doors and change their intellectual lives.

The doors opened. The fellows silenced, straightened, held their breath, posed in their best brilliant intellectual posture. But the figure in the doorway was not Strauss, unless Strauss was secretly an elegant older woman with steel wool hair and a silver brooch the shape of a human brain. She stepped up to the podium and informed the fellows that Dr. Strauss would be unable to officially welcome them to the Meadowlark but had sent his regards. The woman was his secretary, she said (Clay nudged Dmitri, who swallowed a snort), and they should consider her at their disposal should any problems arise. “Of course, it would be preferable that none do.” This apparently being all the orientation they were going to get, she dismissed them. “You’ve received your lab assignments in your welcome packets, please report there forthwith.”

Clay, Mariana, and Dmitri propelled themselves from the room like runners from a starting gate. Lizzie did not move. She had no lab assignment and was seized with the irrational but persuasive thought that she’d made a terrible mistake, did not belong here after all. The secretary pointed at her. “You. Come with me.”

---

Lizzie paused before a baroque wooden door, the only thing standing between her and her future. She wanted to preserve the moment, the possibility that for once reality would live up to fantasy. Then she knocked.

An irritated voice. “What.”

“I’m Lizzie Epstein.” The ensuing silence left too much time for her to consider the negligibility of self. “Your assistant sent me.” Still nothing. “It’s my first day?”

The door opened. “That sounds like an excuse.” This was him, the infamous, the legend, the genius, peering down at her—well, not down; something about his bearing gave him the illusion of height—with disappointment at first sight. “Which begs the question of what you’ve already done wrong.”

He stepped past her into the hall and indicated with a crooked finger that Lizzie should follow. He led her backward, toward the lobby, toward the front door, toward the end of her last chance before it had its chance to begin. She tried not to panic. Then they were in the parking lot. A line from an old self-defense class—never let him take you to a secondary location—surfaced briefly, absurdly, floated away. She climbed into the car.

“You like Bach?” He didn’t wait for an answer before sliding in the CD. Dirgelike strings relieved them of the need for further conversation. She pretended to study the road—studied him. He wasn’t as attractive as he was in his official department photo. Also not as young: reading glasses, receding hairline, skin at his neckline starting to crepe. She pictured Strauss examining his reflection in the bathroom mirror, combing fingers through curls to urge them unrulier, a mad genius determined to look the part. Imagine if he were a woman, she thought, with that brusque, aggressively ungroomed Garfunkel halo… but she checked this line of thinking abruptly. She was growing tiresome on the subject of double standards. She knew this because Lucas had told her so.

Strauss drove them into the city, deigning to explain only once they’d reached the hospital and found their way to the mental ward that they were here to recruit a subject. It was Lizzie’s first trip to a locked ward. It was unlike she’d imagined: no shrieking, straitjacketed theatrics, only the occasional glassy-eyed patient shuffling down the corridor. The closest approximation to Nurse Ratched and her muscled goons was a clutch of pink-suited orderlies, one of them braiding a patient’s hair, another blotting an old man’s bloody nose. Still, Lizzie stiffened at the whine of the door closing behind them, its electric bolt sliding shut.

Strauss stopped at the door marked 8A. “Try not to get in the way.”

Inside, a woman lay propped on pillows, her face turned toward the television, where a bathing-suited bottle blonde pressed presumably fake boobs against the sheen of a new refrigerator, and Bob Barker bared his Chiclets grin. “You again?” the patient said, underwhelmed. Neon dollar signs blinked, a wheel spun, cash fell from the sky.

“Me again.”

“He’s been here three times this week,” the woman told Lizzie. “Doesn’t seem to realize I’m no one’s guinea pig.”

Lizzie wasn’t sure how to react to this. The woman gave her a careful look. “Are you?”

“What?”

“A guinea pig.”

“I’m…” She shook off her nerves. If this was her first test, she intended to pass. “I’m Lizzie Epstein, a research fellow at the Meadowlark Institute. I work under Dr. Strauss.” She extended a hand, but it went unshaken.

“You want to tell her?” the woman asked Strauss.

“You seem to have a firm grasp of your own narrative,” he said.

“Not that you’re taking notes on how I frame it.”

“Not that I would ever.”

“Because I haven’t agreed to let you study me.”

“Not that you ever would.”

Lizzie was stymied.

“Three weeks ago, a woman was found on a Peter Pan bus with no means of identification, including her own useless brain,” the patient said. “The state named her Wendy Doe and diagnosed her with dissociative fugue state. Defined as, quote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Part VIII
• Part IX
• Part X
• Part XI
• Part XII
• Part XIII
• Part XIV: Unfinished Fugue
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Copyright