She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  Volfmann nodded his head without looking at her, just as Harry would have, although there was no visible pouting and no sniffled up tears. He pulled two bottles of water from a small hidden refrigerator.

  “You know, some writers have a gift,” he said.

  Elizabeth smiled, waiting for the healing compliment. “A gift,” Volfmann continued, “for putting in every scene that shouldn’t be there, and leaving out every scene that should. Don’t do that to me, Elizabeth. Don’t make a fucking fool of me. Okay?”

  Elizabeth drank from her bottle of water and thought this over. She noticed a loose thread on his expensive jacket.

  “Yeah,” she said finally. “Okay.”

  INT. SUBURBAN BEDROOM—NIGHT

  CHUCK BOVAINE, a mild-looking young guy, sits on the edge of his wife, GAIL’s, bed. She is a little older, vegetarian gaunt, her face marked by perpetual anger. Her arms are entwined around his neck, but less lovingly than like a poisonous vine.

  GAIL

  Z-z-z . . .

  CHUCK

  Xanax?

  Elizabeth had been working at her parents’ all morning. She had listened with envy to the sound of Harry and Josh splashing in the pool. At lunchtime, Harry had been so tired he fell asleep beneath the kitchen table beside the cat. Harry usually preferred the coffee table in the living room, but Elizabeth left him where he was. She went into the living room and sat down next to Josh on the couch. Josh had a finger hooked in a tear in his T-shirt. His hairy legs and big feet were stretched on the coffee table. He was staring into space.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

  He sounded sad in the same way he had sounded sad when he was a child. That Josh was a man with hairy legs still surprised Elizabeth. She tried to imagine how her mother felt looking at Josh, how Elizabeth would feel when Harry was a man.

  “Who wants an orange?” Greta said, appearing from the kitchen.

  “Don’t wait on us,” Elizabeth said.

  “Me,” Josh said at the same moment.

  Greta handed him a plate of oranges cut in quarters.

  “The smell seems to soothe my stomach,” she said. “This week, anyway.”

  “I am generous enough to give you the pleasure of waiting on me, your only son,” Josh said.

  They sat on the couch for a while, the three of them in a row. No one spoke. Elizabeth listened to the sound of her brother eating. The orange scent was fresh and energetic. She closed her eyes. She was angry at her mother. She was angry at her brother. Didn’t they get what was going on? Elizabeth was conscious of a tangled sense of superiority and exclusion. She felt a hand on hers and opened her eyes. Josh clutched her hand. Her mother’s eyes were closed and she seemed to be sleeping. Josh’s face was contorted and red. He was crying, without making a sound.

  When the doorbell rang, Greta opened her eyes but did not even attempt to get up. Josh, the plate of orange peels balanced on his stomach, wiped his eyes with his fists and looked helplessly at Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth opened the door to a young man with wavy dark hair, rather long, that would have been considered romantic in a far-off era and stylish in another. Elizabeth did not recognize him until he smiled and blinked, and she saw that it was her brother’s best friend, Tim. When he was in high school and lived with his mother, Laurie, next door, Tim had been an ordinary-looking nerdy kid. Now he looked like he’d wandered from a poetry slam to a nineteenth-century English vicarage. And back.

  Elizabeth envied Josh having his friends around. She had been the first of her friends in New York, was still the only one, to have a baby, which had distracted her from friendship, to say the least. But even when she was neglectful of them and rarely saw them and forgot to call them, she always knew her friends were there, going to bars and breaking up with their boyfriends, quitting their jobs, moving to Brooklyn. Only now that she was three thousand miles away did the distance from her friends seem real. Maybe she could be friends with Tim.

  “I brought your mother a book,” Tim said. “From my mother. She said it’s soothing.”

  He went into the living room and threw himself on the couch beside Greta, who was awake from her nap. Tim hugged her and kissed her hand, which made her laugh. Elizabeth remembered how easy he had always been with her mother. He handed Greta the book, An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym, and made small talk while Josh sat glumly on the other side of Greta, and Elizabeth watched, fascinated, from the doorway. Tim’s manner was trusting and open, like a child’s, and as smooth as a ladies’ man. He leaned his head on Greta’s shoulder. He took a tiny Snickers bar from the pocket of his T-shirt and tossed it to Josh. But then he stared at Josh for a minute, stood up and circled the room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, and the ladies’ man disappeared.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth said. “What’s with everyone today?”

  “Well, I have cancer,” Greta said. “Since you asked.”

  Elizabeth was shocked at her mother’s tone. Cold. Angry. It had not occurred to her that her mother might be angry. That’s my job, she thought.

  “Yeah, she does,” Josh said. He unwrapped the candy bar and bit into it.

  “Thank you both,” Elizabeth said.

  “And that’s what’s wrong with everyone,” Greta said.

  Tim started laughing. “Shit,” he murmured. He sat down again.

  Greta patted his head affectionately as she left the room with her book.

  Tim slid from the couch to the floor.

  Elizabeth sat in the indentation he had left behind. She pushed Tim with her foot. “Why are you sitting on the floor?” she asked. “It’s no safer down there.”

  Tim took hold of her foot. Elizabeth looked down at him and she felt herself overwhelmed by a feeling of intense, vast, dizzying relief at being touched by someone who didn’t need her. His hands massaged her foot. It was a casual, easy gesture that bestowed peace, as if he were a priest giving her absolution, or a trainer patting a skittish horse. She wanted to thank Tim. You are a priest, she wanted to say. And I am a mess. But she was afraid she might burst into tears.

  He tapped her polished big toe.

  “Nice color,” he said.

  On a gray July morning, as she and Lotte made their slow painful progress, like a tractor trailer laboring up a steep hill, across yet another waiting room toward yet another receptionist in yet another doctor’s office, Greta clenched her teeth and was silent.

  “Hmmph! Look at the posterior of that one,” Lotte whispered. Her whisper was like a loud hiss. “And she shows it off?”

  Greta did not look. Presumably the one cursed with the remarkable posterior was a large woman in stretch pants, her mother’s favorite target for this particular comment.

  “Maybe nothing else fits,” Greta had once said. “Maybe that’s all that’s comfortable.”

  “It’s a disease,” Lotte had said. She strung out the word “disease,” just as she had “posterior,” as if they were equally revolting, as if they were synonyms. The letter “s” itself seemed damning. She might just as well have been spitting as talking. “A disease.”

  “It’s a disease,” Greta heard her mother say now.

  Greta sat Lotte down, balanced the cane against the chair. The cane was looking a little shabby, scratched and dented with use. So unlike Lotte. It depressed Greta.

  “Maybe it’s time for a new cane,” she said.

  “Where’m I going? Carnegie Hall?”

  Greta turned toward the desk.

  “My pocketbook!” Lotte cried. The alarm in her voice made the receptionist look up. Greta smiled and rolled her eyes at the woman, then immediately felt disloyal to her mother.

  “Here, Mother. I’ve got it.” She handed Lotte her bag and continued to the receptionist’s desk. Behind her, she heard Lotte mutter, “Stupid stick. A new one, yet?” Then came the sound of Lotte shaking out her bracelets. She would hold her arms out in front of her as if waiting f
or a child to jump into them, then shake the bangles, of which there were many, straightening them with a burst of jingling. Lotte characteristically shook out her bracelets whenever she settled into a new room, as if communicating with any other members of her species that might be lurking in the brush.

  “We’re here to see the radiologist . . .”

  “Name?”

  “Dr. Lyman.”

  The receptionist, a beautiful black woman, looked up. Now here was someone Lotte could appreciate. “No, your name,” she said, smiling at Greta, an encouraging smile. God, what people she must deal with to be so kind right off the bat: the dying, the walking dead . . .

  “My name?” Greta said. “But, it’s my mother . . .”

  The receptionist put her hand out and patted Greta’s hand. “What’s your mother’s name, honey?”

  When Greta finally sat down she realized she was shaking. My mother, she thought. My Lotte. How would she help Lotte if she was sick herself? How would she help Lotte if she had no hair?

  She ran her fingers through her hair, which was, indeed, thinning.

  I want my mama, she thought.

  She took Lotte’s hand, whether to comfort Lotte or to comfort herself she didn’t know.

  The surgeon had already tried to get rid of the tumor once, in his office, with something called a Mohs procedure. But the tumor was back with a vengeance, spreading across the landscape of Lotte’s face, and now he wanted to remove a piece of Lotte’s nose. Should the beautiful Lotte’s last days be cursed with half a nose? Before such a drastic step, Greta thought they ought to try radiation. Greta tried to remember if radiation also made you lose your hair. She would have to make sure to ask the doctor that. Privately, when Lotte was out of the room.

  “Life Saver?” Lotte offered Greta the frayed paper tube of candy.

  Greta shook her head no.

  “I don’t like green, either,” Lotte said.

  The bed was big for the little bedroom. The walls felt close. The twins next door had such bright outdoor lights. Scraps of Latin music arrived periodically from somewhere farther down the street. Elizabeth stared at the ceiling and tried to understand which wall faced north, which east, which west, which south. She had no sense of direction. It was a source of anxiety even in New York, with its lovely grid of numbered streets and avenues, its lovely song: the Bronx is up, the Battery’s down; although Elizabeth often found herself wandering in aimless circles even in New York, hoping she might accidentally arrive at her destination. In L.A. of course it was a thousand times worse. She got up, looked out the window for the North Star. But she had no idea what the North Star looked like, really. It was in the Big Dipper, perhaps. But where was the Big Dipper? In the evenings, when she looked out the window toward the ocean, she expected to see the sun setting. But it set much farther to the right, which was supposed to be north.

  She lay down again and tried to take her mind off her location. But the reason she had started thinking about her coordinates was to help her take her mind off her grandmother and her mother. She had already repeated to herself every scrap of Harry dialogue, partly because she held on to Harry’s words as if they were spoken by the Buddha (she knew it was ridiculous, and she tried to keep her worship private) and partly because she liked to relate Harry anecdotes to Greta and Lotte to amuse them. Harry said this, Harry said that. North by northwest. Her grandmother was going south.

  Two of her friends’ mothers had gotten breast cancer, and they were both fine. A professor of hers had died of a brain tumor. She knew a boy in college who’d had colon cancer and he was healthy now. She ran through every person she’d ever met who had or knew someone who’d had cancer, friends who’d just lost a parent or a grandparent. She tried to stop herself, but then she began to think of the people she ought to have called, those friends in New York she’d lost touch with. She knew she’d become careless of her friends even while it was happening. But after Harry was born, people seemed superfluous to her. Sometimes even Brett seemed superfluous. Only Harry was real, a constant presence, a magnificent sun shedding light on the bleak satellites around him. She had seen it happen to others, and she’d sworn it would not happen to her, that self-satisfied, glazed parental worship.

  Who was the sun now? She could see only Lotte, a glittering constellation, and Greta, bright and clear as the Milky Way in the desert sky. No central star. No center. No north, no south, no east, no west.

  She turned all the pillows over to their cool sides and attempted again to switch her thoughts. She tried to sort out some of Mrs. B, but found herself thinking instead of Volfmann, his short graying hair and canine visage, his glowering eyes. Bedroom eyes, she thought, irrelevantly, for they were hardly that. The thread hanging from his jacket. She should have reached over and plucked it.

  She kicked the sheet off. Her mother did not look bad, she told herself. She actually looked rather good. She had lost weight, which was okay, and had not lost hair, which was a blessing. She had switched her uniform from jeans and T-shirts to stretchy yoga pants and T-shirts because she needed to lie down so much and wanted to be more comfortable, a fashion decline that was not really appreciable.

  Elizabeth had always liked the way her mother dressed. She never fussed. She was identifiable. She was predictable. Lotte’s relationship to clothes, on the other hand, was creative, proprietary, demanding. She was a clothes hobbyist, Elizabeth thought. And then realized, No, it went beyond that. Lotte could have been an artist, if clothes were paint or graphite or marble. She could have been a racehorse breeder if clothes were horses. For Greta, on the other hand, clothes were just clothes. Elizabeth had always relied on that quality in her mother, on her pragmatic vision. Elizabeth had always relied on her mother, period.

  She began to cry. When she finished, she got up, washed her face, and found Brett at his desk. She sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around him. He would know what to say to make her feel better. He always knew. Brett kissed her and reassured her. He spoke in a gentle singsong, as if he were telling a wonderful bedtime story. “Those statistics include every ancient crumbling old ruin who ever got sick,” he said. “Greta is young. She’s in good shape. ‘Fifty percent’ means fifty percent do recover. That’s Greta’s fifty percent.”

  Elizabeth listened, her chin on his head, waiting. Brett’s calm had always struck Elizabeth as a thing of beauty, a miracle of physical grace. His tranquility soared before her, as exquisite as a dancer, and she waited for that moment in the ballet when it would lift her in its arms and let her soar, too.

  “And I’m here,” Brett was saying. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll watch over you. I’ll feed you and bathe you and tuck you in at night with a martini. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Elizabeth listened and thought how much she loved him. And still she waited for the feeling of calm.

  Brett brought her back up to bed. He held her and made love to her and she waited.

  He fell asleep on his back and she waited some more, confused. She stared at his long, narrow profile and wondered, Where is the calm?

  She waited for hours. She watched Brett sleep. She looked at the clock. It was three A.M. No calm. She began to worry. No calm? No calm. She began to panic. It was four. No calm. Her grandmother was dying. No calm there. It was five, and her mother was dying. It was six in the morning and she was helpless. There was no calm. There never would be. How could there be? Her grandmother was dying and Elizabeth couldn’t save her. Her mother was dying and Elizabeth couldn’t cure her. And no one could help Elizabeth. No one. Not even Brett.

  “Did you sleep okay?” he asked her in the morning.

  “I don’t know,” she said. And she avoided him all day.

  Elliot King called Elizabeth and Daisy in for a meeting. He made them wait for half an hour.

  “He’s a prick,” Daisy said. She was curled in the leather chair, her eyes closed, looking like a cat, or a snake. Elizabeth tried to decide which. She wondered if Volfmann would be a
t the meeting.

  “Do you ever get lost,” she said, “even though you live here?”

  “No.” Daisy opened her eyes. Her gaze spread itself lazily over Elizabeth. “I’ll take care of Elliot,” she said. “Don’t you worry, Cookie.”

  Elizabeth smiled and leaned back, lulled by Daisy’s eyes, by being called Cookie. She felt as if she had been handed a cookie and some nice cold milk to drink.

  When Elliot finally arrived, Elizabeth was disappointed to see Volfmann was not with him. Then Daisy said to him, “The man behind the curtain!” with such warmth that Elizabeth realized she was jealous. I’m Cookie, she wanted to say. Not Elliot.

  Elliot, wearing a tight, shiny, stretchy T-shirt that showed off his perfectly formed, proportionate, and therefore pint-size muscles, thought over Daisy’s greeting for a split second, weighing it. His scale pronounced it good, for he smiled.

  “Look,” Daisy said, her tone confiding, her voice low, “you are the only one who really gets this project.”

  Elliot pursed his lips, an unconscious smirk, as if he couldn’t help but reveal his glee at having gotten away with something.

  “So, where are we, Elliot?” Daisy said. “Where the fuck are we?”

  Elliot talked about demographics. He talked about content creation. That was what Elizabeth and Daisy were engaged in. Content creation. He had two assistants, young and eager, a boy and a girl. Better than graduate school, Elizabeth thought. She heard the word “dramedy.” Her mind drifted to a passage in Madame Bovary in which Charles’s conversation is described as being as flat as a sidewalk. On which everybody’s ideas trudged past.

  “You’re a wizard,” Daisy was saying.

  Elliot shrugged his shoulders modestly. Then, as he escorted them out, his face became sober and grim.