Tabula Rasa

After the accident, she had almost total amnesia. The doctors were conciliatory and vague, sending her home with a calendar full of therapy appointments and best wishes on reconstructing her life.

She stood in front of her open closet door looking at the clothes she'd been told were hers. Some still had tags. All were revealing, sexy, even sluttish. Her drawers were filled with strange underwears. She tried to imagine a self of hers, a self she might have been, that would feel comfortable with all these clothes' complicated straps, suggestions, contours, and strange pressures. Her husband assured her these were what she'd always worn and urged her to use them again, to try and get her memory started up again. She would, instead, wear the plainest robe she’d been able to find in that closet; she’d wear it all day before she could manage to costume herself in hose and heels, push-up bra and low-cut mini-dress.

If she balked or stiffened when in bed, if his sexual behavior seemed assaultive, her husband assured her that it was what she'd always loved, had craved, had begged for before the accident. Their sex life then had, apparently, been filled with postures and accessories she had difficulty now imagining or imagining as pleasure.

She felt a need for essentials, for elemental experience, rather than for variations upon themes in which she still felt unschooled. She felt virginal and, despite the various proddings and manipulations performed in her marital bed, she still felt that virginal aspect untouched, unassailed as yet, by anything he’d yet down to her.

She began to suspect her husband's veracity and his motives, began to question his version of her past and her past behavior and her personality.