She Is Me (14 page)

“I can’t recall the rest,” she said. “Can you?”

It was another three days before Greta was strong enough to visit her mother. She picked up Elizabeth, although it was out of her way, simply because she could, because she was driving and it felt good.

“I’m very proud of you, Elizabeth,” she said, when Elizabeth got into the car. “You’ve had a lot to contend with.”

“And you haven’t?”

If you only knew, Greta thought. A lot to contend with? Or a lot to feel guilty about? Or a lot to rejoice over?

“I was talking about you, though. You’ve been wonderful.”

“I’m not wonderful,” Elizabeth said in an oddly sober voice.

They pulled up to Lotte’s building. Greta sent Elizabeth in first and parked the car. She sat for a moment in the motionless car, the air-conditioning off, the windows closed, letting the heat find its way all around her.

Until Greta rang the bell and heard her mother’s voice inside, she was thinking of Tony and Josh and Elizabeth, of how disappointed in her they would be, how angry. How unforgiving. She fought back tears at the thought of her family unable to forgive her.

“What is that?” she heard from the other side of the door. “The door? Is that the door? Where’s my Greta? What if something happened to her? Maybe that’s her . . .”

She remembered with a shock that her mother had just had her nose cut off. It would be the first time Greta had seen her without the bandages.

The door swung open. The nose was flattened, like a boxer’s, and cocked rakishly to one side.

“Do you like it?” Lotte said, posing like a model, one hand on her hip.

Greta hesitated. What could she possibly say?

“I got it from the catalog, from Victoria,” Lotte was saying, spinning unsteadily to show off her new sage-colored linen tunic.

“Grandma!” Elizabeth said, reaching out to steady her.

“Overnight delivery,” Lotte said, banging her cane on the thick carpet for emphasis.

Greta was used to swimming laps every morning. Why? she wondered. Back and forth, back and forth. So pointless. Floating seemed pointless, too. And sinking the most pointless of all.

“Can something be the most pointless?” Greta said to someone approaching. She was lying in a chaise, the one with the cushion, a towel covering her. The pool would not cool her. The sun would not warm her. She was shivering. “Can something be ‘the most pointless’?” she said again.

“Don’t be so morbid,” Josh said.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Disappointed?”

Yes, she was disappointed. But she held up her hand and waited for him to take it. “Remember when you wanted to marry me, Josh?”

“No.”

“Perhaps that’s for the best.”

Remember when you wanted to marry Tony, Greta? Remember when you still lived in Manhattan and he drove you out from the city for a weekend in Montauk? In a snowstorm? Remember the ice on the road, the car sliding from lane to lane of the Long Island Expressway? Remember how you felt? As if you and Tony were flying? You flew on the ice all the way to Montauk and walked in the subzero wind on the beach and thought, I want to marry him. I want to be with him forever. I want to have children with him and watch them grow up and then I want to grow old with him and shuffle along the sidewalk holding his arm, both of us dressed in matching sweat suits.

Josh sat at the foot of the chaise. “Mommy?”

“I wasn’t being morbid,” Greta said. “I was being pedantic.”

She thought of the letter from Daisy, a quick, simple thank-you note. And yet she knew. And she knew Daisy did, too. Really, she’d thought of very little else since the letter arrived. Daisy had elbowed thoughts even of Lotte aside, she realized. But all this Daisy nonsense was just that—nonsense. A crush. An absurd crush. And it was not as if she’d never had a crush before. She’d even had crushes on girls before. One does.

Doesn’t one?

But perhaps one doesn’t. Unless one is . . . what? Married for many years with grown-up children? How about that? Married to the man you love? Those crushes were so long ago, she thought. In college. A million years ago. She felt an excruciating throb of love for Tony. She had never even looked at another man. When had she stopped looking at him?

“I’m driving you today,” Josh said.

Greta kept her eyes closed. A week had already passed. Again.

“I hope chemotherapy isn’t the most pointless,” she said.

Elizabeth looked out the glass door that led from the study to the pool. Her brother seemed to be scratching a mosquito bite on his arm. Her mother lay motionless on a chaise. For one moment, Elizabeth knew her mother was dead.

Greta turned her head. Opened her eyes. “Don’t scratch that, Josh!” she said. “It’ll get infected.”

Elizabeth sat down, shaking, and tried to compose herself. Her mother was alive. She stared hard at Greta. She would never take her eyes off her again. Her mother was alive! But then another, unpleasant thought intruded on her feeling of relief: Her father was not home to watch her mother being alive. My father ought to be home, she thought. Doesn’t he see that? It’s cruel to have an illicit love affair when your wife is ill. No wonder he walks with such a heavy tread. No wonder his voice is weak with gloom. No wonder he avoids eye contact.

Greta let Josh help her up. She felt his stocky strength and realized she was proud, as if the strength, the hardy tan muscles, were hers.

Elizabeth watched Josh help her mother. She heard the doorbell ring. That would be Daisy. Daisy didn’t run away from the House of the C-Word the way Dr. Anthony Bernard did. She didn’t rush out the door to raise funds for the Sick or play golf in the rain. She even seemed to like working at the Bernards’ house. It was a pleasant house; the pool was a bonus; no one bothered them. Still, Elizabeth was grateful Daisy understood her circumstances. She wondered how she could make her father understand. He was acting out, as the therapists would say. She would have to think of some way to get him to act in.

Elizabeth let Daisy in and offered her some coffee. Daisy sat on a stool in the kitchen and watched Josh and Greta walking hand in hand along the edge of the pool.

“They’re so sweet,” Daisy said.

“Them?” Elizabeth stopped spooning the coffee and looked at her brother and her mother. Josh still had a T-shirt tan from Alaska. Greta had lost weight. She looked better than usual. What was it? Her hair.

“Mom, what did you do to your hair?” she yelled out the window. “It looks so good.”

Greta turned toward them. “Oh,” she said.

“Come on,” Josh said. “We’ll be late.”

Greta stood another moment. Her towel was draped over her shoulders, but she wasn’t wet.

“I had it cut,” Greta said. “Preemptive move.”

She shivered, then shrugged, smiled, and let Josh pull her along.

“Chemo,” Elizabeth told Daisy, who had said nothing to Greta.

Daisy took Elizabeth’s hand and kissed it, a sympathetic gesture, a graceful offer of kindness. “So many things we don’t expect,” Daisy said, almost to herself.

How odd she is, Elizabeth thought, so intimate and so remote at the same time, calling Elizabeth “Cookie,” kissing her hand, practically moving in with her family. But Elizabeth knew nothing about Daisy at all.

“Do you think she’s a lesbian?” she had asked Brett after they first met Daisy in Malibu.

“Yes.”

“Why, though? I do, too. But why? She wears makeup and everything.”

Brett shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s not. When I was in Berlin, I thought all the women in Germany were gay. Cultural signals got mixed up.”

“She’s American.”

“Are you seeing anyone?” Elizabeth had asked Daisy once, as casually as she could, when they were talking about Barbie’s courtship rituals.

“Seeing,” Daisy said, giving Elizabeth one of her languidly direct looks. “That’s the word for it.”

Josh held Greta’s hand during the drip. He’d met a girl he liked, he said.

I, too, have met a girl I like, she wanted to say.

The girl he liked was from Tom’s River, New Jersey, last year’s winner of the Little League World Series.

“Jesus, Josh, how
old
is she?”

“The
town,
not Samantha,” he said.

The girl I like is from Minnesota, Greta wanted to say. She has an undulating accent, like music. “That’s wonderful, Josh,” she said instead.

Josh smiled. Greta saw she’d gotten it right. “Mom, we
just met,
” he added suddenly, as if she were the one who had brought up the subject, as if she had fixed the two of them up on a blind date.

“Of course,” Greta said.

He nodded, mollified, and continued to hold her hand and talk, friendly, tapping his foot in that way he had. Greta knew to be honored. He was confiding in her. He talked about his job in Alaska for a while. It had just been temporary, anyway. To save up some money. He was glad he ditched it, glad to be back. Now that he was home, he could apply for the research grant he wanted . . .

“I hope this isn’t boring,” he said.

Greta congratulated herself again. A grown son willing to talk to his mother! But instead of the unalloyed pleasure she would once have felt, she found herself wishing she could talk to
him
about
her
girl, tell him, to confide in him, unburden herself to him, to confess to him; to deny the whole thing, repent and ask his forgiveness; to celebrate, drink toasts and dance on tabletops with him.

“Oh, Josh,” she said. It came out as a bitter sigh.

“Mom, don’t worry!” he said. “You’re going to be fine. It’s just these horrible months of chemo. Then it’s okay. You’ll be yourself.”

Myself? That, Greta thought, is the problem.

six

E
lizabeth thought with envy of the scene in the Vincente Minnelli version of
Madame Bovary.
Emma and Charles are invited to a ball at the viscount’s. Jennifer Jones, her shoulders bare and lovely, is Emma, dancing with the handsome viscount, a waltz, around and around, her white skirts whirling, the room around them a spin of delirium, until Emma is in a kind of frenzy. Emma waltzes at the viscount’s in the novel, too, of course, but it made a far greater impression on Elizabeth in the film: the reeling sexual rhythm, the spiral of breathless, physical exertion and pleasure and desire, the beauty of the swirling skirts and flushed faces . . .

Elizabeth had a quick, confused glimpse of her envy— envy that was not a desire to write a scene as good as that in the movie but to be in the scene, to be waltzing, whirling in silk and sensuality, a desire to be lost in a lavish burst of desire.

She tried to remember the last time she had danced. Years ago with Brett at a bar. They hadn’t been out alone together in months, much less at a bar, much less to dance. Those days had faded into the past. But even if I can’t be whirled around, Elizabeth decided, at least I can make Barbie dance. Dance, Barbie, dance. Pow, pow. Shoot the six-shooter at her exquisite feet, the bullets ricocheting in the dirt while Barbie elegantly hops and jumps.

She put Barbie and Dr. Chuck Bovaine at an Oscar party given by a studio head named Wolf. In the emergency room, Dr. Bovaine had sewn up Wolf’s daughter’s Jet-Ski lacerations. When Wolf and his daughter go to the office for a follow-up visit, they meet Barbie, who charms the studio head with her beauty and her gentle presence. And so the doctor and his wife are invited to the Oscar party. No. Not an Oscar party. Wolf’s daughter’s extravagant bat mitzvah. They would dance the hora.

Barbie and Chuck ring the bell at the oversize front door. The too-tight waistband of his unfashionable tux cuts into his belly. She, on the other hand, has never looked more beautiful. He grabs her waist, bends to kiss her bare shoulder.

BARBIE

Let go of me! You’ll wrinkle my dress!

A picture of Dr. Anthony Bernard pushed the picture of Dr. Chuck Bovaine aside. Elizabeth’s father had a big head, too big for his body, and a big square face. She saw him bend a big square head to kiss her mother’s shoulder.

“Tony,” her mother said in protest, squirming away from him.

Dr. Anthony Bernard turned to a woman on his other side, a beautiful young woman who thought his big head leonine and his square face full of character. A woman named Barbie. He lowered his big square face and kissed her perfect shoulder.

“Tony,” she said, sighing with pleasure. “Oh, Tony, darling.”

“Fuck the shoulder kissing,” Elizabeth said out loud. “Who the fuck kisses a fucking shoulder?”

Barbie and Chuck ring the bell at the oversize front door. The too-tight waistband of his unfashionable tux cuts into his belly. She, on the other hand, has never looked more beautiful. He bends down to kiss her.

Barbie turns her face to protect her lipstick. CU Barbie’s face over his shoulder— an expression of bored, bland disgust. She reaches around him and removes a piece of breath-freshening gum from her mouth.

Greta made the usual round of phone calls, interviewed a new batch of candidates with Elizabeth, and then, finally, chose yet another housekeeper for Lotte. This housekeeper was small but mighty. No matter how vulgar Lotte managed to be, this housekeeper seemed to regard her eccentricities as vibrant and assured— signs of life. Touched by Lotte’s helplessness, impressed by her strength, this housekeeper was tireless, but brought to the apartment a sense of serenity. Most important, this housekeeper was a man. His name was Kougi.

Kougi and Lotte spent their first afternoon together discussing politics under the watchful eyes of Greta, Tony, Josh, Elizabeth, and Brett. Lotte consigned dirty gangster politician hypocrites to the lowest levels of hell. Kougi nodded soberly, adding only, “‘Drop wisdom, abandon cleverness, and the people will be benefited a hundredfold . . .’”

Now that Lotte was settled in, Elizabeth returned to her post at Greta’s side. Greta had to explain that mint tea had replaced ice tea as the only palatable food.

“Mommy, you have to eat,” Elizabeth said.

Greta was happy to have her back. She loved the sight of Harry struggling up the steps behind his mother. She loved the sound of his voice and the warmth of his body, squeezed in beside her in the big armchair. She loved the sight of Elizabeth, too. Elizabeth came into her house and criticized her and defended her with the intense abandonment that comes of love, the same vehemence she showed toward Harry.

“You’re impossible,” Elizabeth said.

“You’re no day at the beach, either,” Greta said.

Elizabeth stared at her, as though weighing the virtues of being a day at the beach.

“I’m not?” she said finally. She seemed genuinely surprised.

Harry climbed off the chair and lay beside the cat in a patch of sunlight.

Elizabeth made Greta a pot of mint tea, and then another, and then a third.

“I know you want to help, honey,” Greta said. “But mint tea will not save me.”

“Yes, it will,” Elizabeth said.

Greta smiled at her. She held out her arms. Elizabeth put down the pot of tea and knelt in front of the chair Greta sat on. Greta put her arms around her daughter, her day at the beach.

“Don’t worry,” Greta whispered. She rocked Elizabeth in her arms. “Don’t you worry.”

Elizabeth buried her face in her mother’s neck, comforted and desperate at once. My mother is here, she thought. She is flesh and blood and a soft voice. Without her, the world would have no flesh, no blood, no voice. The arid future without her mother stretched horribly before her. She pressed her face deeper into the cavity beneath her mother’s chin.

“Hello!” Greta said to someone behind Elizabeth’s back.

“A tableau,” said a familiar voice from the direction of the front door.

“Just a lot of stress,” Greta said. “Enough to go around.”

Elizabeth raised her face from its warm maternal burrow.

“Were we supposed to meet?” she said to Daisy, who stood in the doorway, backlit by the bright morning sun.

“I brought your mother flowers,” Daisy said. She was holding a pot of orchids. They, too, were just a black silhouette against the daylight.

Elizabeth stood up. That was so nice of Daisy. Odd, but nice.

“I thought you might be here, though,” Daisy said.

Well, not so odd, then.

“They’re beautiful,” Greta was saying. She had taken the pot from Daisy and given her a brush of a kiss on her cheek. The flowers were a pale glowing green that held, inside, their deep pink.

“Like you,” Daisy said.

I don’t have to do anything, Greta told herself. I don’t have to go any farther than this with it. It’s a flirtation. Someone in my position deserves a flirtation. How many of us get a flirtation at this stage in life? And how well-timed, really. Chemotherapy is so tiring, so depressing. Daisy is therapeutic, that’s all. A diversion. Occupational therapy.

“You don’t have to butter up my mother,” Elizabeth said. “It’s my
grandmother
who requires constant infusions. She’s driving me out of my mind . . .”

“They really are so beautiful,” Greta said, ignoring Elizabeth. “You’re amazing. To have remembered.”

“You like them, really? I’m so relieved. I looked at, like, hundreds.”

An innocent diversion, Greta thought. She met Daisy’s eyes and a tremor of desire passed through her that was so unsettling she reached out for the table to support herself.

“Remember what?” Elizabeth said.

“Your mother said she would never buy flowers for herself, and the flower she would most never buy for herself was an orchid.”

“Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve never liked them much myself. Too much like flesh.” Although, as she looked at the smooth greenish petals, they didn’t look the least like flesh.

“Don’t be so conventional,” Greta said. She was beaming. “It was so thoughtful of you, Daisy.”

“Yes, it was,” Elizabeth said. And I’m not the least bit conventional, she thought. What kind of thing is that for a mother to say to a daughter? “And they’re awfully nice orchids, as orchids go.”

Her mother’s face was bent over the flowers. Elizabeth wished she had brought orchids for her mother. All she had done was make pots of hot, liquid chewing gum. The pot of blossoms on their tall stems had certainly cheered Greta up. She was smiling in a way Elizabeth did not recognize. Elizabeth knew when her mother was lying, and now, although her mother hadn’t said anything much at all, she felt the same airless tension that surrounded Greta’s untruths.

“I never knew you liked orchids so much,” Elizabeth said.

Daisy had settled on a chair outside, near the pool, where she blew big, doughy smoke rings. Elizabeth and Greta stood in the living room with the plant and watched the silver loops rolling toward the sky.

“You never asked,” Greta said.

At six
A.M.
Elizabeth drove Brett to the airport, which was only fifteen minutes away. He was going to Washington to a hearing. Harry slept in his car seat in back.

“I hate to leave you, baby,” Brett said. “I tried to get out of it. I’ll be back in a few days.”

“I know.”

She pulled up to the curb and got out of the car to kiss him good-bye. She wanted to get to her parents’ house. Her father would probably still be home. Maybe she could talk to him. Tell him the story of
Madame Bovary.
Remind him that adultery does not pay. Remind him that these might be his last days with his companion of thirty years. Thirty-two years, actually. Couldn’t he wait until . . . She stopped herself. She ran her hand through Brett’s hair, making it stick up. She liked it when it stuck up like that. It gave his polished beauty an absurd, more accessible quality.

“What?” Brett said.

“I’ll miss you,” she said. Would she? The night before, as Harry slept beside her, his bunny clutched in his arm, Elizabeth told herself it was time to take him to his own room, time to shuffle down the hall with him dangling over her shoulder. But she didn’t stir. From the living room downstairs, beyond several closed doors, she heard the muffled squeal of Brett practicing his bagpipes. She looked at Harry. The sound didn’t seem to bother him. She held him. And when she heard Brett come upstairs, she pretended to be asleep holding Harry. She expected Brett to take Harry from her, to pry him loose, to banish him to his own little room. She felt the heat of her anger at Brett’s anticipated behavior. It spread over her entire body as he entered the bedroom. She hugged Harry. She did not move, frozen in her warm rage.

Brett had not taken Harry from her. He did not lift him up and carry him to his room. Instead, he stood by the bed for a minute. Perhaps he was gazing affectionately at them. Or was annoyed. Or staring off into space. Elizabeth, her eyes closed tight, could not tell. Then, he had simply squeezed into bed beside Harry and fallen asleep. Elizabeth could hear his breathing, heavy and rhythmic. She could hear Harry’s breathing, light and clear. She had tried to hear her own breathing, but realized she had stopped, and forced herself to exhale. She hung on to Harry and his bunny. There’s no room, she thought. There’s just no room.

Then she fell asleep and dreamed of a small bedroom bathed in pale white morning light. A sheer white curtain billowed in the breeze. The walls were white. The floor was white. Where was this place? She was lying on a brass bed. The sheets were white. There was no one else there. She was alone in a cool, soft white room.

“I hate to go,” Brett said, standing outside the car, his arms around her.

“Why did you agree to follow me out here?” she asked. “The only people you see are my crazy family.”

“And my crazy family.”

Elizabeth stared at him blankly. Brett’s parents lived in upstate New York. His sister lived in London.

“You and Harry,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Right! Harry and me.”

Once there had been a sense to the world, an order that awaited her when she opened her eyes in the morning, an order that was as real and inevitable as existence itself. But existence is not inevitable, Greta reminded herself. And order could be disrupted by an unexpected pounding of the heart. Daisy Piperno had settled herself by Greta’s feet on the couch when Greta was sleeping. And Greta had awakened.

Greta dreamed that she needed to put dollar bills into a machine in order to stay parked. But all she had were quarters and dimes and nickels. She looked down at the silver in her hands and said over and over, “I don’t want change, I don’t want change . . .”

Silly dream, she thought when she woke up. But she was pleased with her nocturnal pun. Her hands shook when she answered the phone and when she took in the mail. She stared at the orchid for half an hour, sipping chamomile tea. Daisy had sent the tea to her the day before. When Greta tore apart the big brown envelope and found a plastic bag, full of tiny flowers, she thought it was marijuana. But then she opened the plastic bag, and the scent of chamomile burst out.

Greta had closed the bag quickly, guiltily, as if it really had been marijuana, or the dried flowers would give her away. What nonsense, Greta, she thought. You might just as well watch soap operas all day.

She put the bag of chamomile tea in the cupboard, next to the Twinings and Lipton and Red Rose.

“What’s this?” Tony said that night, after dinner, digging in the cabinet. He opened the bag and sniffed.

“I thought maybe . . .”

“Right. For the nausea. Good idea.”

Greta took the bag from him and inhaled the slightly medicinal smell. What shall I do? she thought. Should I talk to him about this? What is it I would be talking to him about, anyway? A dream? A pun? A bag of tea?

“Does it help?” he said.

He opened a packet of powdered hot chocolate and emptied it into a mug.

And she didn’t want to worry him. He already worried about her so much, too much. She saw how uncomfortable he was, how sad, how eagerly he left the house. He had always spent a lot of time out of the house. It was probably why their marriage worked. But now he left so she wouldn’t see how worried he was. How could she add to his worries? It would be unfair.