She Is Me (19 page)

“I have to go home,” she said.

“Coup de foudre,”
he said. “I love that phrase.”

Elizabeth woke up late the next morning. She had a hangover. She plunked herself down on the front steps with a cup of coffee and read the note Brett had left. Tiny white petals drifted down from a small tree she did not know the name of. A hummingbird whirred by. The air was warming up and the light turning a softer yellow. She watched a black-and-white cat stalk an invisible prey. The note said Brett and Harry had gone to the beach. She imagined them on the sand, close to the crash of the waves. Harry would run in and out of the foam, tripping on seaweed, laughing. Holding Brett’s hand.

She had taken Harry to the dentist a few days before. The dentist had addressed Harry with grave sincerity.

“You are three years old,” he had said. “You’re a big boy. You have to stop sleeping with your pacifier. It causes cavities. And it gets in the way of the teeth that are trying to grow in.”

Harry gazed up at him, wide-eyed.

“Do you understand, Harry?”

Harry nodded.

“It’s very important, Harry.”

“Okay,” Harry said.

When Elizabeth took him out the door, he looked up at her.

“I will not give up my pacifier,” he said. “I will keep it. Up to the day I die.”

Elizabeth imagined Harry, an old man, brittle and bent, sucking on his pacifier. But the thought of Harry old and so eventually dying, even such an absurd thought as the ancient Harry with the plug in his mouth, made her queasy. She wondered if Brett had put sunscreen on Harry. Brett had the kind of skin that turned a lovely deep bronze in the sun. Elizabeth never tanned, always burned. The burns would peel, leaving pale, freckled skin ready to burn again. Harry’s skin was more like Brett’s, but even so, he needed protection. The sun caused cancer. It caused cancer that blossomed and spread. The surgeon with the miner’s lamp had saved enough of Lotte’s nose to paste a flap over, like a balding man covering his bare skull with several long strands. But the red had reappeared. The tumor advanced daily, inexorable rosy lumps bulging across the jaw of Grandma Lotte.

Elizabeth went out the back door and got on her bike. She’d brought the bike from New York at some inconvenience because she thought she would use it in Venice. There were bike paths in Venice. It would be exercise and fresh air. She could put Harry on the back in his special padded safety seat. But this was the first time she had ridden the bike and she wobbled toward the beach.

Brett can’t even remember to put sunscreen on Harry, she thought. Do I have to do absolutely everything? Is it a crime to go out for a few drinks and sleep late? Can’t he even take the child to the beach without making a fuss about it? She grew angrier and angrier as she huffed and puffed down the street. She hoped Harry and Brett had gone to the same place they usually went, just south of the last honky-tonk shop on the boardwalk, just beyond the hot-dog stand and the tennis courts. She was feeling a little desperate now, as if the skin cancer were racing her to the beach towel. She rode as fast as she could.

“Mommy!” Harry cried, spotting her first.

“Hey!” Brett said, giving her a surprised, happy smile, which changed immediately to a suspicious narrowing of the eyes. “Everything’s fine,” he said, his voice defensive.

Elizabeth ran her hand across Harry’s smooth, unblemished cheek.

“Time for some more sunscreen, sweetie?” she said. She didn’t look at Brett.

“Daddy just made me,” Harry said. He started to cry. “Don’t make me. Daddy made me.
Three
times.” He pulled away from Elizabeth, rubbing his tearstained face with sandy fists.

“Three times?” she said in her cheerful, encouraging I-know-you-don’t-want-to-have-a-tantrum voice. She gently brushed the crusted sand from his cheeks. “Well, that’s definitely enough times.” She hugged him. She looked at Brett. She smiled, full of gratitude, full of remorse. She hoped the gratitude showed.

“I’ve been taking him to the beach every day,” Brett said, his voice hard and cold. “Does he ever come home with a sunburn?”

eight

Barbie, Chuck, and REAL-ESTATE AGENT stand before an enormous faux-Spanish mansion. Barbie is beaming. Chuck, slathering sunscreen on his pasty arms and bald pate, looks at the big house with obvious worry.

CHUCK

Isn’t it a little out of our league?

BARBIE

This is our league . . . Beverly Hills . . .

AGENT

Well, Beverly Hills Adjacent . . .

When Greta got in Elizabeth’s car to go visit Lotte, Elizabeth tapped Greta’s finger and said, “Hey! You get that ring at Fred Segal’s?”

“Hmm? Oh.” Greta looked at the ring Daisy had given her. Imagine. Just like that. A beautiful tourmaline ring. A gift. A lavish gift. And a gift she actually liked. There were some advantages to this lesbian business.

“I just saw one like it at Fred Segal’s. I tried it on and everything.”

“Really? I just thought I needed to cheer myself up.”

Elizabeth approved of that. That seemed healthy. Optimistic. But what an odd coincidence.

“Daisy was there,” Elizabeth said. “At the store. She was on her way to a date. Did you know she’s a lesbian?”

“Really?” Greta said. She hoped she said it. She thought she might have actually grunted in a self-conscious, guilty, revealing manner.

“Really,” Elizabeth said. She stared at her mother’s hand. She wished her father had given her mother the ring. Or would he only have done such a thing out of guilt? Perhaps Brett would give Elizabeth a ring. Or Volfmann. She struggled not to blush at the thought of him. She remembered his face, through the alcohol, through her own excitement. He had leaned so close. The image of his animated face, his eyes blazing, kept grabbing her attention, startling her, as if she’d turned a corner and there he was.

“Do you think everyone leads a secret life?” she said.

Her mother was silent. She twisted her ring.

Elizabeth stopped at a light and leaned her head wearily against the wheel, accidentally honking the horn.

“Where does privacy end and secrecy begin?” Greta said.

Elizabeth sat between them. The three of them on the couch. Grandma’s big feet stuck straight out. Greta had taken her shoes off and sat cross-legged. Elizabeth thought, We are out of order. Mom should be in the middle.

“Dirty bastard politicians . . .” Lotte was saying. “Lousy terrorists . . .” She moved on to salaries for baseball players (too high) and the yen (too low). “I like your ring, though,” she said, reaching across Elizabeth’s lap and grabbing Greta’s hand.

Elizabeth saw her mother start at Lotte’s touch. Greta was so easily startled these days. There was a physical, animal quality to her fear, sometimes, that saddened Elizabeth.

“Sporty,” Lotte said.

Greta laughed. “Really? Which sport?”

“I was a
wonderful
basketball player,” Lotte said. “Until that Ilsa Hochstedter knocked me down.”

“When was that?” Elizabeth asked.

“Seventy years ago. The bastard.”

Lotte closed the door with relief. She walked stiffly back to her chair and fumbled for the remote control. She couldn’t find it. She smoothed her new, gorgeous linen tunic and wondered if it was worth getting up again to look. There was nothing to watch on television. There never was anything to watch. The misery, the violence . . .

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 people 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.