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 vicissitudes 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.