She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  Something was rotten in the state of Denmark, Lotte thought. Just as I thought, she thought. I know what I know.

  Brett shook his head, set his mouth, and began to walk out.

  “Daddy!” Harry cried. He ran after Brett. He pulled on his sleeve. “You said!”

  Brett picked him up and carried him out.

  Lotte thought, I keep my own counsel. Then she said, “You’ve got a mouth on you, young lady.”

  Elizabeth looked ashamed. “I just lose my patience sometimes.”

  “Just so you don’t lose your husband.”

  “Grandma! Anyway, he’s not.”

  “A nice, handsome man like that. Earns a nice living. Doesn’t drink. Doesn’t gamble . . .”

  Elizabeth was crawling on the floor, picking up Harry’s toy trucks. She wasn’t paying any attention. No one listened to old people. Lotte banged her cane on the floor. With the carpeting, so beautiful, so thick, and the extra padding, the installation had cost a fortune, there was no sound. Elizabeth put the toys in her bag, then sat on the couch beside Lotte. She threw her head back and sighed. The poor girl. She was exhausted. They exhausted themselves. Children, jobs . . . Lotte grabbed Elizabeth’s hand in both of her own. She squeezed it, kissed it, nibbled on it, then held it in her lap and looked at Elizabeth.

  “Well,” she said, smiling, patting her granddaughter’s hand comfortingly. “Mark my words.”

  Tony got in bed and opened the book he was reading. It was an enormous history of New York City. He’d been reading it for a year and not yet made it out of the seventeenth century.

  “Do you miss New York?” Greta said.

  “I don’t miss Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn is nice now. Nice again. I hear.”

  Tony adjusted his reading glasses. Greta could feel the heat of his body warming the bed. She looked at her hands holding the novel Tim had brought her and tried to ignore the cloudy accusation that seemed to be with her all the time now, swaying like a ghost: I waited too long to go to the doctor.

  But I was so busy with my mother, she said to the ghost.

  Tony’s foot brushed hers, startling her.

  “Anyway, you’re from Queens,” she said to him.

  “Born in Brooklyn.”

  “Fraud.”

  “Well, I don’t miss Queens. That’s for sure.”

  Greta turned off her light.

  “But Queens is the new Brooklyn,” she said. “I hear.”

  She wondered if she missed St. Louis. The heavy summer days, wet and languid with humidity, the trees drooping with green. The trees. There were no trees like that here. Yes, she missed the trees.

  “Funny you have no accent,” she said.

  Tony was asleep, the book open on his belly.

  Daisy Piperno had an accent, but Greta had not quite located it. She was usually good at accents. She had worked at shedding her own, but liked them in others, found them evocative and touching. And Daisy had such a distinctive one—a lilting, musical sound. Greta tried to place Daisy’s accent, to name the senseless, easy singsong.

  She marked the place in Tony’s book by turning down a page, although he hated that. She reached over and switched off his light. She kissed his sleeping lips and turned on her side.

  You’re pretty hot yourself, Daisy had said in her funny undulating croon. Greta felt sleep closing in. You’re pretty hot . . . The words glided gently up, gently down, a ripple of iambs, almost Scandinavian. Greta closed her eyes. Sleep would be so good. Not the oppressive suffocating sleep of chemotherapy, but an airy, scented release. Pretty hot yourself . . . Greta opened her eyes and smiled. Mary Richards, Bob Dylan, the Coen Brothers, and the first Mall of America. You’re pretty hot yourself . . . Daisy Piperno was from Minnesota.

  four

  Lotte’s cancer was turning out to be an unusually virulent skin cancer. The radiation had been a disaster. Did it stop the tumor? No. Did it stimulate the growth of the tumor until it bulged from her face like a large tuber, a red misshapen vegetable, the bastard? Naturally. Lotte sat in her comfortable chair and tried to put the tumor out of her mind, fat chance, as she studied the catalogs. Her favorite was Victoria’s Secret. Forget the lingerie, though. She was too old for that, those prostitutes. But that Victoria carried gorgeous sweaters. And Lotte liked that blazer with gold braid around the sleeves. Classic, without being dull. She sighed. She should have stuck with the surgeon in the first place. Well, now he would have his chance.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  She looked up to see Elizabeth.

  “Darling, darling,” Lotte murmured as Elizabeth bent over to kiss her. Lotte stroked Elizabeth’s head with its lovely hair, hidden away, such a waste.

  “Scared?” Elizabeth said.

  “There are no atheists in the foxholes,” Lotte said solemnly.

  Elizabeth nodded her approval of the blazer.

  “The navy,” Lotte said.

  “I assumed.”

  “The red is vulgar. Not always, mind you.”

  “No,” Elizabeth said obligingly. “Red can work.”

  Lotte held Elizabeth’s hand, feeling the youthful skin. She kissed her granddaughter’s fingertips, the way she used to when Elizabeth was younger. When she was younger, herself.

  “So, Grandma, don’t worry,” Elizabeth said. “He’s a good surgeon.”

  “Top man,” Lotte said.

  Lotte ordered the blazer over the phone while Elizabeth made herself a cup of tea.

  “I have exquisite taste,” she told the woman taking her order.

  Elizabeth helped her dress. Lotte watched her arms slide into the arms of her turtleneck. She closed her eyes and felt it cling to her face as Elizabeth pulled it over her head. The cotton, a very fine cotton, glided across her lips. Now it was on. Now Elizabeth was adjusting it. Now she would go to the hospital and lie on a hard table and that handsome prick would cut her face with a knife. Downstairs, the doorman wished her luck. “You look like a million bucks,” he said. Her Morris used to say that. Lotte tried not to cry.

  “See that?” she said to Elizabeth. “An old bitch like me, sick as a dog?” She wondered if she should have ordered the blazer. She might die on the operating table.

  “I bequeath that jacket to you, sweetheart,” she said.

  “Oh, Grandma.”

  “Man tracht, Gott lacht,” Lotte said. “Man plans, God laughs.”

  “After your operation, I’ll take you out to dinner in your new jacket.”

  Lotte smiled. She liked an outing, liked an excuse to wear her new clothes. For a moment she forgot that she was going to the hospital to have a piece of her face cut off and then, perhaps, to die.

  “But what will you wear, sweetheart?” she said, turning to look at her granddaughter, so grown-up, driving a big car, a truck almost, and she’d heard on the radio they were dangerous, the dirty bastard SUVs.

  “Why are you driving Mommy’s car?” she said.

  “Brett needed ours.”

  “Where is Mommy, anyway? Who’s driving your mommy?”

  “Josh is meeting us,” Elizabeth said. “Mom can’t come, Grandma. I told you. What if she’s contagious? From the flu?”

  “Some flu,” Lotte said.

  Elizabeth’s such a big girl now, she thought, watching her get her own money out of her own pocketbook to pay for parking. “Oh! My bag! Where’s my bag?”

  Elizabeth held it up.

  “Thank God you found it,” Lotte said. She clutched it. She unzipped it. She pulled out a wadded-up Kleenex.

  Elizabeth laughed. “As long as I can remember,” she said. “Tissues and Life Savers.”

  Lotte said nothing more about Greta. She suspected Greta must be gravely ill and that they were protecting her from knowing. Good. Let them protect me. I deserve protection. She wondered if God laughed at the believers in the trenches. No wonder she had never approved of religion, those dirty hypocrites in their synagogues and churches. But her poor Greta. No flu lasts so m
any weeks. Then again, who knows? Maybe it was a lingering flu. Maybe Greta was not deathly ill. Maybe no one was protecting Lotte. No one does protect you in the end, she thought.

  “I know just the thing!” she said suddenly. “The silk cardigan with the zipper. The taupe. With your black pants?” She nodded assent at her own suggestion. Lotte in her navy blazer, her granddaughter in the taupe silk. “Very flattering,” she said.

  Josh and Elizabeth sat on the same couch in the hospital waiting room that Elizabeth had been sitting on with her father when they waited to hear the news about Greta. Elizabeth shivered in the air-conditioning. Josh put his arm around her.

  “What did you tell her about Mom?” he asked.

  “Flu. The same old fucking flu. She didn’t exactly press me, either. She just called Mommy from my cell phone in the car, told her not to worry, said she hoped Mom would feel all better soon. It was almost like two normal people talking.”

  “She knows something’s up,” Josh said.

  “And doesn’t want to know.”

  “I’m with Grandma.”

  Elizabeth waited with Josh outside the recovery room. They wore yellow, wrinkled scrub suits that looked dirtier than their street clothes. Elizabeth wondered what Lotte’s face would look like now.

  “One at a time,” the nurse said, and led Elizabeth through a room of coughing, sleeping, vomiting, groaning bodies.

  Lotte lay on a stretcher. She was naked. Her body was a bluish white. Elizabeth tried not to look at her pubic area, the hairs white and sparse. She pulled a sheet over her grandmother. She glanced at the nurse as she did so: Okay? The nurse nodded yes. Lotte was breathing bubbly snores.

  “Grandma?”

  Lotte opened her eyes.

  “It’s me—Elizabeth.”

  Lotte had a bandage covering most of her face. Elizabeth took her grandmother’s hand in both of her own.

  “Mama?” Lotte said.

  “She’s fine,” Elizabeth said, then realized Lotte was not asking about Elizabeth’s mother.

  Elizabeth waited for her grandmother in the room she would occupy. A woman in the next bed moaned softly, then cleared phlegm from her throat. The chair was a dull blue leatherette and had a high back. The bed was made up with tight cheap white sheets. The muffled sound of an ambulance could be heard beyond the grimy windowpane. The room itself seemed fairly clean, though. Elizabeth sat as the afternoon became darker. Her grandmother had looked so frail and so skinny. She had clasped Elizabeth’s hand with such force.

  A nurse came into the room with an enormous bunch of flowers. She switched on the harsh overhead light.

  “Someone’s lucky day!” she said.

  Lucky day? She’d had her nose cut off!

  Elizabeth looked at the card. Laurence Volfmann? How nice, she thought. Of course the twin secretaries had sent them, but he must have asked them to. She had barely mentioned the operation to him. He had remembered. It would make Lotte so happy. TO A TRUE TROUPER! said the card. It was an incredibly generous and thoughtful gesture. The arrangement was as ornate and almost as large as one of Greta’s gardens. And he doesn’t even know Grandma. But he does know me, Elizabeth thought. And as she pictured Volfmann in the dark suit and lilac tie she’d last seen him wearing, she found herself repressing an excited smile.

  She turned the light out and sat in the dark wondering why Volfmann wasn’t married. She knew he’d had an extremely costly divorce a few years ago. Maybe that was the reason. That’s what I should tell people when they tell me to marry Brett. Too many alimony payments!

  Why didn’t she want to marry Brett, really? None of her friends had a kid when Elizabeth found out she was pregnant with Harry. They had assumed she would get an abortion or get married. But both of those choices were unthinkable for Elizabeth. She wanted to have the baby, Brett wanted the baby, and she wanted to raise the baby with Brett. She just didn’t want to get married. And the more Brett pressed her, the less she wanted to get married. If only she had an easy explanation she could have given him. Or even a complicated explanation. But all she had was an image: she saw herself walking down the aisle, and at the end was . . . the end.

  Elizabeth had encountered that image when the subject of marriage came up from the time she was a little girl. Why? she wondered. Her mother always seemed so happy with her father. Greta never complained, worked at what she loved, and though Tony was not the most attentive husband, he was warm and he obviously adored Greta. So, what had given Elizabeth this idea? Perhaps she had seen Madame Bovary as an infant.

  Volfmann’s flowers sent an almost narcotic perfume through the room. Elizabeth leaned her head back and forced herself to imagine walking beside Brett toward a rabbi, toward a justice of the peace, toward a ship’s captain, a judge. No, it was no good. She could not imagine living without him, but she could not imagine marrying him, either. What would happen if she and Brett did split up, though? How do you divorce someone you’re not married to? Well, that’s the point. You can’t. So you have to stay together.

  She looked at the outline of Volfmann’s floral arrangement, silhouetted by the light coming from the parking lot. A girl could go for a guy who sends flowers to her grandma, she thought. And, Elizabeth reminded herself, if you’re not married, you can’t commit adultery.

  That was Madame Bovary’s mistake. Becoming Madame Bovary.

  “I’ll be at the hospital later,” Tony said the day after Lotte’s surgery. “I’ll get your mother some peaches.”

  Greta was often taken by surprise by Tony in this way. Her mother was impossible, swore like a sailor (which Tony still hated, after all these years), told him the same stories over and over. Her mother, most important, was her mother, not his. And yet, even when she wasn’t in the hospital, Tony would drive all over Los Angeles looking for the ripest peaches. He would go to Malibu to get her the smoked mussels she liked.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Greta said.

  “The Elderly appreciate little gestures.”

  “The Elderly will be thrilled. It would be awfully nice, if you really want to.”

  Greta listened to Tony sing “Joe Hill” as he gathered his things.

  “Oh, but she won’t be able to eat solids yet,” he said. “Maybe lemon meringue pie. She likes that.”

  He waved good-bye. She heard the garage door noisily jerk open. Tony’s car started up. She turned on the dishwasher. He was a good husband. She knew that. He was an even better son-in-law, chivalrous and charming, seeming to sense how much the attention of a man meant to Lotte.

  She envisioned her mother, trapped in a metal bed, a thin, faded hospital gown slipping, unnoticed, from her shoulders; the looping intravenous tubes hanging, hopeless and immodest, like nylons hung to dry in the bathroom. Greta suddenly and almost desperately wanted to go to the hospital herself. Lotte was her mother. She had to go to the hospital and see her mother. It was that simple.

  She found her keys and got in the car. She started it up and jumped as the radio came on full blast, a Burger King ad in Spanish. She switched the radio off. She was grateful to Tony. She was sick to her stomach. She was angry and full of self-pity and ashamed. Her mother needed her and she did not have the strength to back the car out of the driveway. She needed her mother and her mother was lying helpless in a hospital bed unable to eat peaches. She rested her head on the wheel until she was able to switch the car off. She walked slowly into the house, tripping on the cat, who sprawled in a patch of sun, and lay down.

  As she eased slowly away from consciousness, Greta could almost smell the fragrance of the ripening peach her mother could not eat, of lemon meringue pie, of the lemon she squeezed into a tall glass of ice tea; and then the citrus scent of Daisy Piperno’s breath, warm and intimate, as she leaned forward to bestow a good-bye kiss on Greta’s cheek.

  “Bye, you,” Daisy had said. And Greta had inhaled the balm of her words.

  The nurse called Elizabeth that afternoon.

  “Your grandm
other is agitated,” she said. “Very agitated.”

  Elizabeth recognized angry panic in the nurse’s voice and rushed to the hospital, much to Harry’s dismay.

  “Don’t go,” he wailed. He lay on the floor and held her right ankle in his hands. With each step she dragged him across the floor with her, a kicking, curly headed ball and chain. “Don’t go, Mommy. Mommy, don’t go.”

  She picked him up and they clung to each other. Keep me here with you, she thought. Don’t let me go. She promised to call him on her cell phone from the car and he finally calmed down. She kissed his flushed face and tore herself away, leaving him whimpering in Brett’s arms, the mucus in his nose and the pacifier in his mouth making breathing a gulping arrhythmic effort that Elizabeth could hear even in the driveway.

  “Hi, Harry,” she said when she called him five minutes later.

  “Hi, Mommy.”

  “I’m on my way to Grandma’s now. At the hospital.”

  “I know,” he said, patiently, as if she were astonishingly literal minded. “Bye, Mommy!”

  When she hung up, Elizabeth thought of his hands around her ankle. She wished they were still there, holding her.

  At the hospital, the head nurse, who wore a pink nylon blouse that depressed Elizabeth, apologized for putting Lotte in restraints.

  Elizabeth stared at the pale skinny person held down on the bed by an orange-mesh-net vest strapped across her middle. She had a large white bandage across her face. Her white skin was bunched up beneath transparent tape. What was left of Grandma Lotte’s nose? It’s like the invisible man, Elizabeth thought, and felt immediately guilty.

  “Untie her,” Elizabeth said.

  Lotte’s hands were tied down, too. She struggled and moaned.

  “She’s agitated . . .” the nurse said.

  Elizabeth bent down and began undoing the straps herself.

  “I’ll watch her,” she said.

  She watched her grandmother for hours. She wrestled her back to bed when Lotte flailed and tried to escape whoever was chasing her. The rest of the time, Elizabeth watched Lotte sew. Lotte pulled the imaginary needle through the imaginary cloth. Again and again. Sometimes she bit off the imaginary thread. Sometimes she turned her head to the next bed, where a woman was moaning.