Wunderland by Jennifer Cody Epstein
FOR JOAN AND TOM, WHO KEPT ME LOVINGLY STOCKED IN PENS, PAPER, AND LITERARY PRAISE
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
—Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
1.
Ava
1989
She sits in a sea of tangled sheets and blankets, amid the white crests of packing peanuts and age-curled pages of letters pried from their envelopes with increasing feverishness. The bed is solid: the same heavy oaken headboard, same stained, sloping mattress upon which she has slept and breastfed and read and sketched for more than a decade; the one place she comes to truly be at rest. And yet at this moment, she’s somehow both floating off it and falling right through it, is both untethered and sinking like a stone.
Perching her reading glasses atop her head, Ava Fischer clasps her knees to her chest. Her face tight and hot with tears shed, dried, and shed again, she tosses the last of the letters onto the bed. Surveying the sun-challenged domain that serves as both drawing studio and master bedroom, she finds herself amazed that it looks exactly as it did a little over an hour earlier, while in the same amount of time her entire world has been gutted, brusquely turned on its head. And yet the illustration she’s been working on still sits atop her drafting table, anchored at one corner by an untouched plate of marmalade toast and another by a cold coffee mug inscribed with Drink Me. A few peanuts that escaped in her initial frenzy of unpacking the box still lie strewn on the shag carpet, air-puffed stars in eccentric and porous constellations against a worn, dun-colored sky.
But it’s the bed that holds the full evidence of Ava’s emotional undoing. The bed, with its wrinkled sheets and mismatched cushions, its dusty bedskirt and moth-eaten coverlet, its stale tobacco tang that somehow lingers on four full years after she stopped smoking. The bed, with the now-empty Luftpost carton her daughter had signed for earlier and carried in to Ava with mild curiosity (It’s from Bremen. Isn’t that where you grew up?).
The bed upon which Ava had then waited for what felt like hours, box in her lap, for Sophie to leave to meet her friends. Upon finally hearing her daughter’s plastic-soled flats patter down four flights of stairs before exiting onto Second Avenue, she’d dropped the package long enough to lunge toward the window to watch the thirteen-year-old stroll off, her hands in the pockets of her checked menswear vest, Walkman headphones glinting silver in the sun.
The bed, where she’d read the lawyer’s curtly formal note less with shock than a sinking sense of acceptance:
Sehr geehrte Frau von Fischer:
As your mother’s lawyer and designated executor of her estate, I regret to inform you that your mother—Ilse Maria von Fischer—passed away on the twelfth of April, after a long battle with uterine cancer.
In accordance with her wishes, I enclose her remains for your disposal and request that you confirm delivery by fax or phone at the numbers listed on our letterhead. Once we have your confirmation we will be able to release the remainder of your inheritance, roughly 71,000 marks. If you do not confirm receipt in person, I’ve been instructed to donate this amount to The Blue Card, a charity of your late mother’s choosing.
I also include some letters that your mother asked be forwarded to you, and request that you confirm receipt of these as well.
With condolences and best regards:
Bernard Frankel, LLP
Leaning stiffly against the headboard, Ava again forces herself to make these impossible-seeming connections: between the idea of remains and the Tupperware-style container she’d pulled from beneath the peanuts an hour earlier. Between Mama—that inevitably fraught and painful thought—and the gritty powder Ava had discovered upon prying off the container’s lid. It hadn’t smelled like Ilse, that disquietingly familiar blend of facial soap, 4711 cologne, and faint perspiration. It certainly hadn’t looked like her; in Ava’s mind’s eye her mother was eternally milk-skinned and muscular, golden-haired and silver-eyed. Above all, overwhelmingly dense.
And yet staring into the ashy depths, she’d registered the truth of the lawyer’s assertion: this was now quite literally all that was left of Ilse von Fischer, the evasive, icy parent who had abandoned Ava physically during the war and emotionally in its wake; who’d left her in this very apartment twelve years earlier, while Sophie wailed from her crib. And while it saddened Ava to realize that the woman herself no longer walked and breathed, in the end it hadn’t really shocked her; for Ava, Ilse had effectively ceased to exist the moment she walked out the door that hot summer of 1977. Yes, for a few years there’d been the occasional long-distance call that Ava cut short after hearing Ilse’s curt Hallo. There’d been the slow trickle of cards and letters and the occasional small package, all of which Ava returned to Bremen unopened. But once Sophie grew old enough to answer the phone and read the return addresses on envelopes, Ava changed their number and sent a telegraphed ultimatum through Western Union: