Once upon a time, the Epstein family was whole: one mother, one father, two daughters. Becca was older by five years, irritatingly golden in hair and touch. Becca had playdates, sports teams, tennis lessons, play rehearsals, friends and talent and ambition. Lizzie, friendless, uncoordinated, left ever further behind, was content to be the one who had their grandmother. They ate microwaved cinnamon buns, drank hot chocolate, watched her grandmother’s stories. Lizzie watched, first, because her grandmother watched, and because here, occasionally, were adults in a feverish sexual disarray that both repulsed and intrigued. Here, eventually, was where Lizzie discovered the monstrousness of love, long before her mother enacted it. Here, ultimately, was where Lizzie found a world more comprehensible than her own, a reality that bent to the exigencies of narrative desire. The soap world was karmically rigid—secrets inevitably revealed, wrongs avenged, innocence redeemed—but physically malleable. Wives became entirely different women, an announcer would inform the audience of the substitution, and life proceeded accordingly. Almost everyone came back from the dead.
Her grandmother was a widow. Everyone’s grandmother seemed to wind up a widow. Lizzie’s mother told her once, “That’s the thing about men, always leaving, one way or another.” Later Lizzie would wonder whether this had been a warning from mother to daughter that this particular woman intended to leave first. Lizzie’s mother left abruptly. Lizzie’s grandmother left gradually, drifted away from herself in bits and pieces, names and nouns. But even when she could no longer recognize her own granddaughter, she still recognized the women on TV, asked after them as if their comas and kidnappings were real. Once Lizzie’s father got sick, Lizzie had given up trying to brace the wall between fact and fiction. Reality offered little but loss—why not let her grandmother believe as she liked. She didn’t need to know that Lizzie’s mother had come home to care for her dying ex-husband, that Lizzie’s sister had fled to Israel, abandoned them all in favor of God. Instead, Lizzie would sit by her grandmother’s bed, hold her palsied hand, tell her that Yasmine’s affair had come to light and Eleanor was about to figure out she’d married her kidnapper, that Jasper had woken from his coma but couldn’t remember whose bullet had put him there. She never told her grandmother she was majoring in psychology, specializing in memory, subspecializing in figments, false memories indistinguishable from real ones, because she needed to understand why Yasmine and Eleanor and Jasper had been remembered, while Lizzie was forgotten.
Talking to Wendy Doe was a little like talking to no one, but that was still too much honesty to risk. Nor was Lizzie in the mood for the easy lie. “If you think about life as a war against loss, then memory is the only real weapon we have,” Lizzie finally said. “So how could I study anything else?”
“If you think about life as a war against loss, you’re kind of setting yourself up for defeat, no?”
“I didn’t make the rules.”
“I must scare the shit out of you.” Wendy sounded proud. “Thank you for the lack of bullshit in that answer.”
“How do you know it wasn’t bullshit?”
Wendy paused, like this was a good and difficult question. “Maybe it’s easier to see through everyone else’s shit when you don’t have any left of your own.”
“What you said before, about how it feels not to remember—how it feels like nothing? Tell me more,” Lizzie said. “Please. I want to understand.”
There was silence. They sipped their tea. Wendy stared hard at the surface of hers, as if trying to memorize its particular color and sheen. Lizzie tried to imagine building a life moment by moment. There might be an impulse, she thought, to binge on the present, shovel memories, no matter how mundane, into the gaping void.
“Have you ever forgotten anything you desperately want to remember?” Wendy asked.
Lizzie thought about her father’s smell, the weight of her father’s arms when he hugged her, the sound of his voice when he yelled at her, when he thanked her, when he told her he loved her—all the things she could no longer summon. Her memory of him was like a photo album, finite and fading, the images too flat, the gaps between them impossibly wide. “Yes.”
“It doesn’t feel like that,” Wendy said. “It doesn’t feel like a puzzle. And it doesn’t feel like a missing leg or something. It doesn’t feel like anything’s missing.”
“That’s why you don’t want your memory back?”
“You don’t get it: I don’t not want it back, and I don’t want it back. There is no it. You can’t miss what never happened.”
“But just because you don’t remember it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The it here is your whole life.”
Wendy shrugged. “You asked how it feels. That’s how it feels. Look—do you have a kid?”
“No.”
“You want one?”
“I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Him who?”
“Your future baby,” Wendy said. “This helpless, adorable creature who you love more than you’ve ever loved anything. You would die for him.”
“Are you saying you think you have a child?”
“No, I’m saying, do you miss him?”
“Of course not. There is no him yet.”
“Exactly.”
* * *
When she went back to her room, Lizzie made a list: every moment she could remember from the last two weeks. She managed a few lines of conversation, a drugstore trip for toothpaste, the sense that she’d been mildly sad, the invitation from Gwen that had not come. Almost everything that happens is forgotten. Decades swallowed. Maybe, Lizzie thought, the mystery isn’t why we forget some things and not others. Maybe the mystery is why we ever remember.
Lizzie’s favorite soap convention was the retcon. This was fan lingo for retroactive continuity, an Orwellian revision of past events. The narrative gods recklessly reshaped the past to suit their present needs: We have always had a third child. We have always had these mysterious scars and the violent backstory that produced them. We have always been at war with Eastasia. She did not miss the child she hadn’t yet had, or any other nonexistent presence from her imagined future. But the logic doesn’t hold, she might have told Wendy, were she a person inclined toward personal confession. It was possible to miss a thing you’d never had, a remnant from some alternate and preferable version of the past. Sometimes Lizzie felt like she was missing an entire life. All the people she should not have lost. All the things she was meant to possess: Love. Success. A home. A purpose. A sister who was not absent, a father who was not dead. She would have happily remembered a different life, and almost could. Other Lizzie, better Lizzie, felt like a name dancing on the tip of her tongue, a life she could take back, if she could only remember living it.
WENDY
How to be a test subject
For a CT scan, drink contrast solution and wait sixty to ninety minutes for it to circulate through the bloodstream, make the brain glow. Feel the fluid warm your veins, make you want to pee. Do not pee. Step behind curtain, strip. Gown. The room is too cold. The gown is too thin. Enter a bright white room. Lie down on the padded table. Let technician arrange your body, brace your head in place. Let him fasten a thick strap across your chest. Try to breathe. Watch him disappear from view. Watch the ceiling slide one way as the table slides another, through a large, flashing tube. Try to breathe. Unless the voice in the intercom tells you not to breathe. Do as it says. In this room, it is the voice of your god.