“Aha!” Lotte said. She smiled triumphantly. “You, Dr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, said a mouthful.”
It was almost six by the time they got home. Elizabeth clumped up the stone steps into her parents’ house, a three-bears, wood-shingled sort of place nestled into a hill in the Rustic Canyon section of Santa Monica. Greta’s elaborately designed garden billowed around Elizabeth as she climbed the steps and navigated the mossy path that led to the front door. Her mother designed gardens for a living, and her own garden, changing styles every few years, was now a carefully planned jumble of roses and heather and lavender.
“Through the moors and highlands, fells and dales, the downs, the heaths, the copses . . .” Elizabeth said.
“Such a vocabulary,” said Grandma Lotte proudly.
Elizabeth left them and went out to the patio in the back. There were more steps, leading up the almost vertical hillside to the pool, and she heard Brett and Harry splashing and playing up there. Daffodils swayed in the breeze, hundreds of them. She was a little homesick for New York, there at Santa-Monica-on-Thames. The daffodils reminded her of springtime in Sands Point, Long Island, where she had grown up. But the smells were off. It still smelled so strange to her at her parents’ California house, even though they’d lived there for more than ten years. Like an exotic desert spice cabinet, in spite of every British blossom her mother planted. The smell of one particular flower—she hadn’t been able to locate the culprit yet—intruded now and then, a nauseous scent, like dog shit, wet dog shit, waiting to jump her when she least expected it.
She heard Brett coming down the stairs, singing “Yankee Doodle” to Harry.
“I’m a foreigner here,” she said. “Even though I grew up here.” She was sitting with her back to the stairs. She didn’t get up or turn around. She liked that moment of uncertainty, not knowing exactly where they were, but knowing they were there.
“You didn’t grow up here,” Brett said. He was right behind her now. “Your parents moved here when you were in college.”
Elizabeth felt his hand, cold and wet from the pool, on her neck. She reached back and held it. Something began tugging on her hair and Brett walked into view, holding Harry, whose hair was slicked to his head, his face shining, his wet eyelashes even darker and longer than usual. His fist was clamped around a lock of her hair, pulling it loose from the clip.
“Let go, Harry,” Brett said. “I feel like a foreigner, too, sometimes.”
“You are a foreigner.”
Brett had grown up in South Africa. His father was an outspoken liberal there, a cancer researcher and university professor in Cape Town, and they had been forced to leave when Brett was eight. The family moved to Rochester, a cultural and climatic change that was reflected in Brett’s accent, which shifted from the soft, sweetly off-kilter British accent of English-speaking South Africa to the flat, nasal tones of upstate New York, depending on which word he had learned in which place.
He had been Elizabeth’s student, which was how she met him. Brett stood out from the other students not only because of his height but because he was so obviously older, a couple of years older than Elizabeth. His hair flopped down from a middle part and he kept jerking his head to the side, like a teenage girl, trying to get it out of his eyes. He’d had a goatee then, too, and had looked wonderfully poetic to Elizabeth. Even so, there was no reason for him to be attending a seminar called The Poetics of Adultery. He’d already gone through law school and worked for a year at a firm in New York when he decided to go back to school to get a graduate degree in philosophy. Elizabeth met him outside her classroom, where he sat on the floor, a disturbed look on his face, listening to a squawky news broadcast on a small radio.
“My father’s uranium has been stolen!” he said, pointing at the radio.
Brett was not like anyone she’d ever met. His career was upside down. His accent was motley. His father’s uranium had been stolen. He wore a gray checked shirt and a pale-blue plaid tie. He had a long face and a narrow, prominent nose. His eyes were narrow, too, and dark. But his mouth, which was wide, and two deep dimples softened the sharpness and gave him a demeanor of distracted gentleness. Elizabeth fell instantly in love.
“Why are you taking my class, anyway?” she asked him some months into the relationship. “It’s not required. It’s not related to what you’re doing. It’s not even a graduate course.”
She realized as she asked the question that she hoped he would say he had seen her, admired her from afar, and registered for the course in order to get to know her.
“Well, it’s so early in the morning, your class. So it seemed prudent, didn’t it?”
“It did?” Elizabeth said.
“In a getting-oneself-out-of-bed sort of way.”
“But now you’ve got yourself into bed,” Elizabeth said, indicating the rumpled sheets and pillows around them.
“Yes,” Brett said. “It all came out right in the end.”
Elizabeth remembered that day so well. Brett had suggested they get married. He had often suggested it since. And just as often she had suggested they wait.
“Let go, lightey,” Brett said now to Harry. “You’ll hurt Mommy.”
Harry was shaking his head no. How did Harry know that what sounded like “lit go” when Brett said it had the same meaning as “let go” when Elizabeth said it? How the hell did he know what “lightey” meant? Children were very intelligent. He was three, skinny for a toddler, which she liked, though before he was born she admired only stocky, sturdy toddlers. She reached for him and stood him on her lap, wondering at the almost desperate surge of love, as if they had been apart for forty years rather than forty minutes.
“Brett,” she said, pronouncing it “Brit.”
Brett hated his name. “Shut up, won’t you?” he said.
Elizabeth asked Harry if he needed to pee. He glared at her.
“Should we call Daddy ‘Bob’?” she said.
Harry shook his head. He smiled from behind his pacifier. He pulled the pacifier out with a pop.
“No,” he said. He plugged himself up again.
Elizabeth put her face against his cool forehead. She rather liked “Brett.” A cowboy name. Harry’s hair stuck to her lips. She drew in the damp scent of his little body, felt his curled hand pushed against her breast. She listened to him breathe.
She closed her eyes. She heard the birds, the dogs barking next door. She felt the cool air. God, she thought. There is a God after all.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” said a small voice.
Elizabeth opened her eyes.
“Sad?” he said. He offered her his pacifier.
“No, no.” She wiped her eyes. “Mommy’s having an epiphany.”
When Greta came out and saw little Harry curled in Elizabeth’s lap sucking on his pacifier, she thought how cute he looked, his cheek creased against his mother, his wet hair stuck to his forehead. His swim diaper was swollen with pool water. She suddenly remembered the soggy weight of Elizabeth’s postnap diaper and the threatening furrow of her brow, like a dark storm cloud on the horizon.
Greta kissed Elizabeth on top of her head and pulled playfully at Harry’s pacifier, as if it were the plug in the bathtub.
“It doesn’t hurt their teeth,” Elizabeth said.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“Good. Don’t.”
“Look at you, Elizabeth! You’re curling your lip the way you used to when you were little,” Greta said. She smiled at the memory, which for some reason comforted her. “I think pacifiers are cute, if you really want to know,” she said. “Like Maggie Simpson.”
“That’s hardly the point,” Elizabeth said.
“No, that’s hardly the point.” Greta sat across from Elizabeth and Harry. Harry reached out for her, then crawled wordlessly across the low wooden table between them and settled in Greta’s lap. Greta held him and remembered Elizabeth as a child so clearly it was confusing. Elizabeth’s curly brown hair, her mouth roun
d and talking at full speed or silent and extended in a determined pout, her manner ridiculously arrogant, her cheeks pink and vulnerable.
“What are we going to do?” Elizabeth said, tears coming to her eyes. “I feel so helpless.” She reached across the table and took her mother’s hand.
Such an unlikely combination, Greta thought. The misanthropic sentimentalist. Skeptical of the world at large, Elizabeth could nevertheless be foolishly, innocently, and thoroughly zealous toward the world up close. It struck Greta, not for the first time, that Elizabeth was a sort of inside-out version of her father. Tony was an exceptionally kind person, though it was necessary that the objects of his kindness be generalized, categorized, and named as part of some group, like “the Elderly” rather than his parents, or “Empty Nester” instead of his wife, or even “Awkward Adolescent” when that term fit Elizabeth and Josh. Groups of complete strangers were, of course, ideal. Tony had briefly succumbed to the lure of Mao in college, and he still retained a great compassion for and interest in the needs of the People. It was a shame, Greta thought, that he was so vague about any person in particular. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was as loyal as a dog to her friends and family, as wary as a dog toward the rest of the world.
“You’re just like Daddy,” Greta said, and Elizabeth looked so pleased that she did not have the heart to add, “in reverse.”
For the next six months, Elizabeth flew back and forth to Los Angeles in a frantic shuttle that accomplished nothing, never did anyone any good, and still seemed vital. She met once with a young agent who was the nephew of one of her mother’s clients and willing to sign up just about anybody, but most of the monthly visits were a simple attempt to help her mother out.
Now, sitting in her own living room, a long, dark rectangle with windows facing an air shaft, she dialed her grandmother’s number, sure that Greta would be there as well. She always was. It was a bright, sunny day outside, but the room was so dark that Elizabeth could barely see the toys mounded like the banks of a river along the walls. Her mother answered Grandma Lotte’s phone.
“Grandma’s pretty good today,” Greta said. “I just gave her a shower.”
“A blessing,” Elizabeth heard Lotte say in the background.
“What about you, Mom?” Elizabeth said. “You’re exhausted.”
“How’s Harry?”
“You can’t keep running over there every five minutes, sleeping on Grandma’s couch, cooking for her and for Dad . . . And you’re working, too . . .”
“What am I supposed to do?” Greta said. “Grandma has to eat, she needs to shower . . .” Then her tone changed abruptly from a tense and defensive rumble to a tight, higher-pitched sound of controlled, straining rage. “Mother, I told you before,” she was saying to Lotte, “the pills are lined up on the dining-room table. In order. Look. See? You check off the box on the pad when you’ve taken it. . . . No, you will not die of liver disease because you took your Tylenol twenty minutes early . . . Yes, I will fix your lunch as soon as I’m off the phone with Elizabeth . . .”
“Mom? Hire someone?” Elizabeth said, as she always did.
“Easier said than done,” Greta said, as she always did.
“I want Jell-O,” Grandma said.
“It’s like having a two-year-old,” Greta said into the phone to Elizabeth.
“I’m three,” Harry said. He had picked up the extension in the bedroom.
“Yes. You’re Grandma’s big, good boy.”
Elizabeth was glad she could bestow solace in the form of Harry, because her mother would accept little else. Whenever Elizabeth went out there, she of course took Harry with her. Greta was so happy to see him that she seemed to cling to him, pressing her cheek against his head the way she still did with Elizabeth sometimes, so perhaps the trips really were restorative in some way. Her mother was not feeling well, rushing to the bathroom every minute with nervous diarrhea, but when Elizabeth offered to take Grandma to the doctor or to spend a night with her or to cook her a special dinner, or even to heat up a can of soup for her, Greta would agree gratefully, then insist on coming along and doing it all herself.
“Poor Elizabeth,” she would say, doing all the work Elizabeth was supposed to take off her shoulders. “You’ve got Harry to look after.”
“What about Brett?” Elizabeth said on one occasion when Brett had come with them.
“Yes, you’ve got him to look after, too.”
“Mom, that’s not what I meant.”
two
It was late February, and Elizabeth stared at the Christmas tree in the living room, which was somehow still standing in the corner, a sad, desiccated betrayal of her ancestors as well as a fire hazard. The phone startled her.
“Mommy has to go in for a test,” her father said. He rarely called Greta “Mommy” to the children anymore, though Elizabeth and Josh called their mother “Mommy” far more often than one might have expected from two adults.
“You do?” Elizabeth said. She assumed her mother was on another extension. Elizabeth tried to call them only when she thought one or the other might be out, though there was nothing she could do when they were the callers. She hated it when both of them were on the phone. It was like talking to neither one. Her words were projected into uncertainty, into thin air.
“I do,” Greta replied from the ether.
Elizabeth had no idea what they were talking about. Was her mother becoming a real-estate agent or something? Did she need to renew her driver’s license?
“Don’t worry,” Tony said.
“It’s nothing,” Greta said. “I told him we didn’t have to call you. I told you not to call, Tony.”
“She has a right to know.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Greta said in a sharp voice. “That’s why they do a test. If we knew, we wouldn’t have to do a test, would we?” Then she began to cry.
“Right, yes, that’s right,” Tony said. His voice was soft, soothing. “To rule it out,” he said. “Just to rule it out.”
Gradually, Elizabeth was able to ascertain that her mother had a lump. Elizabeth listened to them discuss the lump (in her colon), the test (to rule things out), and the timing (as soon as possible). Their voices, joined together in their customary telephone duet, seemed even farther away than usual—one strange, garbled, disconsolate articulation.
The night before she was to fly out to be there for the biopsy, Brett held Elizabeth as she fell asleep, her cheek sweaty and crumpled against his chest.
“Imagine hearing that your mother might have cancer and responding with an overwhelming sense of crankiness,” she said. She was ashamed.
He kissed her forehead. “You’re not cranky,” he murmured. “You’re angry. And why not?”
She felt his lips, still pressed lightly against her skin, shift into the faintest of smiles, a smile she knew well—his modest (for he was modest) but honest (for he was that, too) appreciation of his own easy temperament, his good humor. Elizabeth knew she gave him too many opportunities to display his patience. Perhaps it was one of the things he liked about her. She hoped so, hoped his amused forbearance would not wear out before she could morph into a more balanced, even-tempered sort of person, something she was always aspiring and planning and attempting to do.
“Thank you,” she said. She held on to him. He was wearing pajamas, one of his quaint customs. She had never known a man who wore pajamas, not even her father, who wore boxer shorts to bed. She buried her face in the clean, starchy smell of the pajamas.
“I love you and your pajamas,” she said.
“I love you and yours,” he said, stroking her naked body beneath the sheet.
Elizabeth welcomed the surge of desire, an enormous wave of physical emotion. She smiled at the image of a wave, imagining a tidal wave with pickup trucks and mobile homes and shacks on its foaming crest.
“Thank you,” she said again, pulling him against her.
He kissed her throat. “You’re very, very welcome
,” he said, his voice soft and husky and muffled.
Later, rolling away from him, she said, “You’re making me sweat,” though he was already asleep. She listened to his breathing. She heard the familiar gurgling with each exhale. It sounded almost like speech. She tried to synchronize her own shallow, rabbity breaths to his.
She flew out to L.A. the next morning and took a taxi to the hospital. She sat for hours with her father waiting for the verdict, sure that the tumor would be benign and certain that it would not. Her father was wearing his white lab coat with his name stitched across the left breast pocket, like a bowler or a gas-station attendant or a security guard. Or a doctor. His ID was clipped to his lapel. DR. ANTHONY BERNARD.
Elizabeth wondered disloyally why Dr. Anthony Bernard had not noticed the lump on Mrs. Dr. Anthony Bernard, had not wondered about the stomach cramps and the diarrhea. Of course, he rarely saw patients anymore. He had left the bedside to become an impassioned and brilliant fund-raiser for his hospital. Admirable, Elizabeth thought. But a lump is a lump.
“She’ll be all right,” she said, as if that would relieve him of the guilt she had just assigned him, or relieve her of the guilt of assigning it. “Don’t worry, Daddy.”
He took her hand and kissed it. His lips were chapped. She dug in her bag for lip balm and handed it to him. In his white coat, he looked particularly helpless to her, as if the coat, labeled in black stitched script, were the real Dr. Anthony Bernard.
They called Josh in Alaska when they got back to the house, and surprisingly he was at the base camp. He was four years younger than Elizabeth. He loved rocks and was so happy among them that Elizabeth suspected they loved him back.
“It’s malignant,” she said. “It’s stage C.”
There was silence on the other end.
“It’s encapsulated, though,” she said. She repeated it. “Encapsulated.” Encapsulated was good.
Her father was pacing up and down the house. He kept bumping his shin on the same sharp point of the coffee table. “Shit,” he said, each time, back and forth. “Shit.”
She Is Me Page 3
