She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  She clucked and shook her head. She sounded like a chicken, which disgusted her. She examined her fingers. They were thick and crooked. Like an old woman’s hands. She reached over to the table beside her and picked up the bottle of silvery nail polish there. With quick, practiced, but inaccurate strokes, Lotte slid the brush along her thickened nails. She admired the wet shimmer and rested her hands on the armrests to dry.

  Greta had looked thin and white. But radiant, too, in an incongruous way. Lotte wondered if she had, God forbid, TB.

  “Ke-nein-e-chora,” she said, pretending to spit, to keep the evil eye away. “I didn’t say TB, God,” she said. “Forget I even mentioned it.”

  “Just the flu,” she added, loudly.

  Poor Greta. She remembered her as a little girl, her hair blond and bouncing, her lips like a little rosebud. Running toward them at visitors’ day at camp. Her arms outstretched. Her smile giddy with love and anticipation. Lotte had opened her arms to receive her lovely daughter in her forest-green shorts and yellow polo shirt, not the best color combination, but woodsy, anyway, and little Greta, running, running, had seen her mother’s arms open and had faltered, just for a moment, but long enough for Lotte to notice and then realize, even as Greta changed direction by a couple of degrees and flew into her mother’s arms, that the little girl, glowing with the great outdoors, had been running, really, to her father.

  But she knew! Lotte thought, with satisfaction. She saw my face and she knew how much I loved her. She knew I would be disappointed. She knew who to come to! Smart little girl. Didn’t want to disappoint her mommy.

  Lotte was glad to have seen Greta even if she did wish her daughter had looked a little more robust. After all, she thought, there’s only so much a person my age can tolerate.

  She realized she had to pee. She cursed her bladder. She pushed down on the arms of the chair with her own arms. She leaned forward as the physical therapist had taught her to. She heaved herself up, but tipped back again before she could get the strength in her legs to stand upright. She tried it two more times before she could stand. It was a struggle. Every day was a struggle. Where was the cane? On the floor? Goddamned dirty bastard of a cane. That would mean sitting back down to be able to reach it, then heaving herself up again. But there it was, thank God, thank God, leaning against the chair, within easy reach. She hooked it with her bent forefinger. Why did everything go at once? The legs, the hands, the face, her poor, lovely face? At least she had all her organs cranking away. Her heart would last forever, with its valve replacement. Or so they’d said. She tried to remember the heart surgeon as she walked slowly and painfully to the bathroom. The pain in her face was maddening. She stopped to catch her breath and whimpered a little, the soft sounds filling her with tenderness for herself. Kougi would be back tonight, thank heaven, or Buddha or whoever he was always going on about. She had not allowed Greta or Elizabeth to wait with her. She was not that far gone, for Buddha’s sake! Elizabeth was a good girl, she thought, but why had she gotten her hair cut so short? “I’m sick of myself,” Elizabeth had explained, as if that meant anything at all. Lotte stopped at the mirror in her bedroom and fluffed her own hair, white and silky, with her free hand. People don’t know what they have when they have it, she thought. If you have your health, and an independent income, well then . . .

  And Lotte lowered herself onto the toilet with genuine pleasure, and with pride.

  Elizabeth sat on the steps in front of her house beneath the branches of the white birch tree that grew by the gate. The dappled sunlight played on the dark earth, on the daylilies, on the spiderwebs. Brett came out and sat on the step beside her. He patted her new haircut. “It will grow back,” he had said when he saw it. She took his hand. It was such a small garden and so much went on there. Whole lives. Whole worlds. Brett’s hand felt unfamiliar. A hermit thrush dug in the dirt. A hummingbird stood in the air.

  “Your father called,” Brett said.

  Elizabeth tried to swallow. The feeling that the world was receding before her eyes, then whooshing back in, like a wave, was so disconcerting. She held on to the step beneath her.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “No, sweetie, she’s okay,” Brett said quickly.

  It’s okay, she repeated to herself. She’s okay.

  “Which she?”

  That pronoun had become her enemy. It meant uncertainty, fear, illness, death.

  “Both shes. It’s okay. He was just looking for your mother, actually. She’s gone out. Old Greta certainly does get out and about these days.”

  “Out and about,” Elizabeth said. Old Greta out and about. Brett stood. His knees were at eye level. There were grass stains on his khakis. Where out and about? Her mother was out and about far more than she ought to be.

  “Where does she go all the time?” she said. “It’s as if she had a secret life. What if my mother has joined a cult or something?”

  “That would be ghastly.”

  Somehow the word “ghastly” gave to the idea of Greta in a cult a pleasant, comic quality, as if she were a character in an English novel, as if she were merely eccentric.

  “Mom is so eccentric,” Elizabeth said, though she really wasn’t, was she? Brett was already up the stairs and out of earshot, but Elizabeth didn’t mind. Eccentric was so much nicer than sick. Than ill. Than cancer victim. Than a battler of cancer. Cancer on the presidency. Cancer survivor. Cancer had so many clichés associated with it. She would have to reread Susan Sontag’s book. She wondered which word was dragged into more hackneyed phrases—“cancer” or “Odyssey”? She wondered what kind of odyssey her mother, the cancer patient, was on.

  “So eccentric,” she said.

  Greta had begun going out almost every day. Sometimes, on a bad day, she made it only as far as her car. When that happened, she called Daisy on her cell phone. Daisy would appear in half an hour, which was just about how long it took Greta to get back into the house.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into the phone on one of these mornings. She was too tired even to speak normally.

  “Go inside and lie down,” Daisy said. “May I come and watch you sleep?”

  Greta dragged herself back to the house and collapsed on the living-room couch. Sleeping while Daisy sat near her was one of her greatest joys. It made the time seem worthwhile, useful, full, instead of wasted. Tony was at the hospital, Josh at UCLA where he’d gone back to finish his master’s degree. And Elizabeth off at some business meeting. Greta stood up from the sofa as Daisy opened the unlocked front door. Daisy walked straight to her, put her arms around her, and kissed her. Each time this happened, Greta felt a lovely, subtle shift, as if someone had opened a window.

  “You just relax now,” Daisy said. “I’m here.” Her voice was soft and soothing. Greta lay down again and wondered how it was possible to feel so peaceful and so excruciatingly aroused at the same time.

  “It’s very confusing,” Greta said.

  “A puzzlement,” Daisy said. She sat down on the couch, put Greta’s feet on her lap.

  “This is where we first met,” she said.

  “Romantic, isn’t it?” Greta said with disgust.

  Daisy lit a cigarette. “Oh, shit,” she said. She leaned forward, revealing two nicotine patches on her back just above her waist, and stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of her shoe. “I’m sorry.” She bit her lip. “You’re so patient, Greta.”

  Greta laughed. “I’m patient?”

  “Well, the patient.”

  Greta watched Daisy get up, then kneel beside the couch, her face touching Greta’s. Daisy kissed her and Greta closed her eyes. She felt Daisy stroking her hair. Now and then Daisy would murmur some endearment. Why? Greta wondered. It wasn’t clear to Greta why Daisy had any interest in her. Perhaps it was Freudian. Daisy had a need for mothering. But it was Daisy doing all the mothering, it seemed, and anyway, Greta wasn’t really old enough to be Daisy’s mother. Of course Daisy lied about her age, all those movie p
eople seemed to. She claimed thirty-five. But to Greta she revealed, after extracting a solemn oath of secrecy, her dirty secret—she was forty. Greta was fifty-three. She could have been Daisy’s mother’s younger sister, perhaps, but not her mother. Maybe Daisy had a thing about aunts.

  “What is the feminine equivalent of ‘avuncular’?” she asked. But she fell asleep, her face pressed against Daisy’s, before she heard the answer.

  The drive to the studio was slow and jerky with traffic, and although the gray sky was not dark enough to be gloomy, it was dreary, it was drab. Elizabeth wondered what she would find at the other end. She hadn’t seen Volfmann since the night at Shutters. She had thought about him. A lot. In her thoughts he was close, his face an inch from her face, his words hot against her lips. She sat in the car in the traffic. She was filled with a vibrant unease.

  When she saw him, she smiled, he smiled, she sat, he sat.

  “I thought Daisy was coming, too,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “She’ll be late. Sick friend.”

  I have a sick mother, Elizabeth thought. A sick mother and a sick grandmother.

  Volfmann chucked her under the chin and said, “Buck up, kiddo.”

  She took the bottle of icy water he gave her. She realized she was terribly thirsty and drank most of it, a small rivulet trickling down the side of her mouth.

  Volfmann grabbed a Kleenex and dabbed at her face.

  “There,” he said.

  “I write, I drool . . . You name it,” she said, too embarrassed to take her eyes off the hand holding the Kleenex. She noticed again how beautifully his nails were done. His hands smelled good, too, clean and soapy.

  “Elizabeth?” he said.

  She looked up into his eyes. His boxer face looked seriously back at her. “Yes?”

  “Elizabeth . . .”

  He walked away from her, put his hands in his pockets, then quickly took the hand with the Kleenex out of his pocket, looked at the crumpled white tissue as if he’d never seen it or one like it before in all his life, tossed it in the wastebasket, and wheeled around to stare at her.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Twenty-nine,” she said.

  She liked his face more than she ever had before. Its scrubbed, almost youthful glow softened his boxer-dog expression. He seemed on the verge of something, of saying something, of doing something. Her ears were ringing.

  “Does it really matter?” she said. And she looked away, feeling idiotic and coy. Her age didn’t matter. Of course it didn’t. She wasn’t seventeen. She was an adult. A consenting adult, should she choose to consent.

  “No,” Volfmann said, his voice ordinary and reassuring, the tone intruding on her thoughts. “You’ll trim that scene at the county fair, of course,” he added.

  What? She gazed out at him from the confused, outraged heat of her embarrassment, helplessly, angrily blushing. Then she thought, The county fair? It was perfect the way it was. And most of it was quoted directly from the novel.

  “By about half, do you think?” Volfmann was saying. He had moved back to his desk. “Or three-quarters?”

  “No way —”

  “Do you know how lucky you are?” he yelled. “I’m giving you a course in screenwriting, and I’m paying you for it. I don’t even look at scripts until they’re ready to shoot.”

  His face softened, became thoughtful, and he continued in a normal voice. “Why am I doing it? I wonder. You think it’s a midlife crisis? Well, better Madame Bovary than a Porsche.” He walked around the perimeter of his office, tapping things, stopping to idly open and close a drawer, running his fingers along the back of the long sofa, like a dog marking its territory. “So, now, economy, okay? In the scene? In every scene. And the scene has got to do more than one thing? And there’s no, how can I say this? Feeling. There’s no fucking feeling.”

  Volfmann stood before her, looking down at her silently. She was exhausted. She hated him. She saw a rather tender expression in his face, thought, Go away! I don’t want to like you now!; then thought, Yes, I do, then, But that scene was so good, and said, “So, basically, it sucks?”

  “Sucks, doesn’t suck—what’s the difference?” he yelled. “We have a story to tell!”

  When Greta had suggested they go to services for Yom Kippur, Tony groaned and declared he couldn’t bear to sit for hours and then listen to a rabbi appeal for funds for Israel and the new lobby for the Hebrew School. Then he seemed to remember, almost in midsentence, that Greta had cancer and might naturally seek Solace in Religion, as so many Victims of Serious Illness do.

  “Well, who knows,” he had added quickly. “Maybe things have changed. And a little atoning never hurt anybody.”

  Elizabeth and Josh looked at her guiltily, saying of course they would go if she really wanted to, but since Yom Kippur was kind of a sad day, shouldn’t they go to a fun movie instead?

  Lotte had simply snorted. “The bastards,” she added. “The dirty rotten hypocrites.”

  Greta wanted to shake them, to dig her fingers into their arms and shake them. Don’t you see? she wanted to scream. I have to go. I carry a heavy weight. My conscience burns with guilt. I am an adulteress, a liar, a cheat. A wanton harlot. I have betrayed all that is dear to me. I need to bare my soul.

  “Sometimes, I feel so guilty,” she told Daisy. “I kind of thought of going to synagogue this year. Only the Kol Nidre. I could rend my garments while I listen.”

  Daisy had turned out to be more than Greta had bargained for. Greta had longed for her, for her touch, for her presence. But she had somehow not imagined friendship. Now she had a lover who was her closest friend, the one she gossiped with about her lover.

  Daisy put her arms around Greta. They lay in bed in Daisy’s bedroom, a tiny cubicle with high ceilings. A ledge ran around part of the room on which sat dozens of papier-mâché Mexican puta dolls, each one with legs spread, her name painted across her bosom, real earrings hanging from her ears. Elena was a blonde. Estella, too. Gloria had black hair and green earrings. Anna, a tiny blonde, wore red. Flor’s turquoise outfit had pink flowers and glitter. They all had painted shoes and little white painted socks. Greta found their garish colors and bored, harsh Kewpie faces frightening. She turned her face into Daisy, relieved by the warmth.

  “I hate it that you feel guilty,” Daisy said.

  “But I am guilty.”

  “I hate that, too.”

  Greta thought, How dare you hate that? That’s who I am, that’s the only part of me you know.

  “If you hate that, you hate me,” she said, furious. And they proceeded to have a fight.

  “Guilt is a useless emotion,” Daisy said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean? That you’re uncomfortable? So am I. So what?”

  “And you think you’ll find solace praying? You’re as bad as Madame Bovary —”

  “This is not your movie, Daisy.”

  “She went to a priest. And you know what he talked about? A sick cow!”

  “Who said I wanted to fucking pray, anyway? Did I ever say that?”

  “And then the priest said, ‘It is indigestion, no doubt . . . You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a little moist sugar.’”

  Daisy said these words in an exaggerated French accent that forced Greta to laugh, which further infuriated her, so that she tried to play out the quarrel awhile longer.

  Whenever Greta fought with Tony, he became either baffled or disgusted, and left her alone while she cried. Later, he would comfort her. When she fought with Daisy, Daisy ended up crying. And Greta ended up crying. Then they both ended up comforting each other.

  “It’s very strenuous,” Greta said, kissing the tears that trembled on Daisy’s eyelashes. Daisy dabbed at Greta’s nose with a tissue.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Women are a pain.”

  Greta held Daisy tight, pressing her
face against Daisy’s, hard; desperate, suddenly, wanting to cross the boundary of skin against skin.

  “I don’t know how long I can do this,” she said, her voice muffled.

  “Don’t leave me,” Daisy whispered.

  Greta held her even tighter.

  “It isn’t you I’m thinking about leaving.”

  They fell asleep, as tired as if they’d had sex. When Greta woke up, Daisy was snoring gently, like a cat. Greta touched the black hair splayed on the pillow.

  How did this happen? she wondered. I wish this had never happened. Thank God this happened. What is it that’s happened?

  Daisy opened her eyes. “Why don’t you just come to my synagogue with me?” she said. “But would that be atoning? Or further sinning?”

  “You’re Jewish?”

  For a second, Greta felt absurdly elated. As if that made it all right, as if that made everything all right, as if now her mother would approve and her children would give their blessing and Tony would say, “I’m so proud! A nice Jewish girl!”

  There were times when Elizabeth, having dinner with her grandmother, watched the food Lotte had just chewed come out a gap near her nose where a scar that refused to heal was separating. Elizabeth would lean forward with a tissue and quickly wipe the stuff away, hoping Grandma Lotte wouldn’t notice she was leaking orange Jell-O.

  Greta lay on the couch. She felt tears running down her cheeks, but could not for the life of her imagine where they were coming from. The nausea cradled her, a malevolent, suffocating embrace.

  “Maybe you really should smoke some grass,” Tony said. He stood over her. “I can get some. Medical grade.” She waved him away.

  “I can get you some Kytril.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. She said it sharply, more sharply than she intended. Her eyes closed. She meant to keep them open. She had a date.