She Is Me (21 page)

Just yesterday, her mother had insisted on going shopping and then insisted they take Lotte with them. Greta, who dined out on horror stories of adolescent shopping fiascos with Lotte, who had worn cutoff jeans beneath her dress to her own bat mitzvah, and Lotte, who found it difficult to walk down to the lobby, who wore a long iridescent gray scarf wrapped loosely around her throat to hide her tumor. Shopping. Together. But it had worked out in the end. Lotte had plopped herself down in the security guard’s chair at Barneys and sent Elizabeth to fetch this and that for her to examine while Greta had uncharacteristically bought up a storm. Still, it might very easily have been a disaster, as Elizabeth had pointed out on the way home.

“Perhaps we’ll have a disaster next time, dear,” her mother had said soothingly.

Elizabeth pulled the car into the strip mall where the Little Palms Play School was. A nursery school in a strip mall. Well, why not?

She stood outside, leaning against the car door, her eyes closed, soaking up the sun. Which will then give me skin cancer, she thought. But the sun was warm and gentle, and the glare did not penetrate the dark lenses of Elizabeth’s sunglasses or the lids of her closed eyes. The air was dry and just cool enough. There was no sense of autumn in the air, no sense of any season. Elizabeth felt the lightest breeze. Her lips felt the breeze and she thought, I’ve been kissed. Not by Volfmann, that ancient, churlish, dog-faced gargoyle. By a handsome stranger. Or, better yet, by Tim. Tim, who had a crush on her. What a herky-jerky imagination I have, she thought. Am I really so fickle? Then she wondered: Would Tim’s kiss be soft and romantic and young? Or hungry and young?

Elizabeth! Such clichés!

But is there nothing to say ever? she wondered. Nothing to feel that isn’t reeking with the banality of other people’s experiences? That isn’t tagged like something at a garage sale? Can’t I even fantasize in peace?

She reverted irritably to Volfmann. His bottom lip pushed out just a bit. His mouth was just inches from hers. She could taste his words. She forgot she was angry at him. She forgot about clichés. She forgot her fantasy was prosaic. She kissed Volfmann and felt him pushing her back against the car.

“Mommy! Mommy!”

Elizabeth opened her eyes to see Harry, his arms wrapped deliriously around her legs, one hand dangling a dented piece of colored paper smeared with paint. Alexandra barreled after him, waving her own painting.

Elizabeth picked Harry up, buried her face in his hair. When she put him down and looked at the two of them, their hands stained purple and red and a hideous green, Volfmann ceased to exist. She smiled and praised their work and kissed them, reassured that one nursery school was much like another, strip mall or no.

“Into the car!” she said. She felt happy and carefree now. Harry and his friend Alexandra were all she had to think about. She watched the two children climb into their car seats in the back. She leaned in to buckle them up, giving Harry another kiss as she did so. She felt his cheek and closed her eyes, breathing him in. She felt a wet tongue on her cheek, a new smell.

Between Harry’s face and her own a small brown dog with a worried expression had inserted himself, wriggling and wagging his tail, jumping from one of them to the next, licking all three faces.

Elizabeth pulled the dog out of the car. The children were squealing in delight.

“Here’s your little dog,” she said to a mother parked beside her.

“Oh, he’s not mine.”

Elizabeth tried the other parents, then unbuckled the children and locked the car and brought the dog and Harry and Alexandra into each of the stores at the strip mall, but neither the Thai, taco, nor chicken restaurant had lost a little brown dog.

The dog had no collar. His ribs showed through his short coat. He looked at her with round, sad eyes and a fretful, wrinkled forehead. His body was too long for his legs, which were bowed. Chihuahua face, German shepherd coloring. His tail was too long for his body. One ear stood up and one flopped down.

No one claimed the dog. Of course no one claimed the dog. One look at the dog and anyone could tell no one would claim the dog. He was a sorry little stray, and had been a sorry little stray for a long, long time.

“You want to come home with us?” Elizabeth said.

Harry and Alexandra were delirious. They thought up names all the way home, each and every one from a television show or a movie or a book.

“Spot!” Harry said.

“He’s
brown,
” Alexandra replied.

“Clifford?”

“The doggie is
brown.
”

Elizabeth looked at the little dog, curled up in the passenger seat. Don’t pay any attention, stray dog. There will be no brand name for you. You have no breed. Why should you be stuck with a brand? We’ll call you something original and wonderful, something that fits you, something literary perhaps, or what about Wotan? The Wanderer.

Wotan? But how was Wotan any less derivative than Scooby-Doo? She was as bad as the children. Couldn’t she think for herself? So . . . what if she called him something plain, like, say, Jim? Yeah, and while you’re at it, buy a canoe, she thought. Jim. Might as well name the dog L.L. Bean.

When you got right down to it, what name wasn’t a brand? She thought what a shame it was that language had devolved from being a means of expression to being little more than a flag. Expressing oneself, once a naive occupation of her parents’ generation, had somehow devolved into waving that flag, conveying one’s place in the world, or the place one would like to hold. Pity. When everything in life was judged as an adornment rather than by its utility, when even a dog was seen as an accessory, when even its name was chosen as a mirror for one’s own aspirations, then what name was free, what name was personal, what name just a name? Fido? Certainly not. Fido was retro. Dog? No—merely ironic.

Elizabeth realized she was agonizing over this more than she had over naming Harry, which had not been inspired by the prince, no matter what Brett thought or Lotte hoped. She gave up. “We’ll name him after the first sign we see,” she said.

And so the dog was named Temple Ben Ami.

Every night, the minute Harry was carried, asleep, into his own bed, Temple would jump in beside Elizabeth. Every night, when Brett returned to bed, he threw the dog onto the floor and the dog jumped back up.

“I don’t want this dog in my bed.”

“You can judge a civilization by how they treat their dogs.”

Temple burrowed beneath the blanket, between them.

“Gandhi said that,” she added.

“Gandhi drank his own urine.”

Every day, Elizabeth shuttled from her mother’s to her grandmother’s and back. She lived out her days and sometimes her nights with them, yet her mother and her grandmother, as stationary and solid as furniture, were now drifting just out of her reach, her grandmother toward death, her mother toward uncertainty. She clung to them like a child.

The weather was unpleasant. It was hot, and the marine layer, as the residents of Venice so delicately called the fog, seemed never to lift. After Elizabeth dropped Harry off at nursery school, she made the drive to her parents’ in a lethargic daydream, making the turns automatically, so that when she arrived, she was momentarily confused.

“I’m losing it,” she said to Josh, who was spread out on the couch reading the newspaper.

“I’m hungry,” Josh said.

“I’ll make you an egg-salad sandwich,” Greta said, walking in from the kitchen. “Except for the smell. I forgot. I can’t stand the smell.” She looked a little green. “How about turkey? Except there is no turkey.”

“Anyway, you’re going out to lunch today,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t make Josh his lunch. Relax and enjoy yourself.” She glared at her brother.

“Yeah, relax,” he said.

“He’s not a baby,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah, I’m not a baby.”

“He can get his own lunch,” she said.

Josh nodded agreeably. He smiled. He didn’t move. Greta looked from him to Elizabeth to the kitchen and back to Elizabeth. Elizabeth started toward the kitchen, thinking of the empty refrigerator. Two eggs, perhaps, some lactose-free milk, a couple of lemons. The sight of too much food in the refrigerator made her mother queasy.

“Hey, I know,” she said. “Why don’t I go out and get Josh a sandwich?”

She sat on a stool at a café by the beach, waiting for her order. She was glad to be alone. Her mother had looked so good today. She had color in her cheeks. Elizabeth leaned on the table, her chin in her hands. She was toying with the idea of an ice coffee when she heard a familiar voice.

“Hi,” said Tim. He sat beside her and ordered a chocolate milk shake.

Elizabeth examined his profile. His nose had a bump in the middle that she decided gave it, and him, character, though if anyone had asked her why, she would have been unable to answer. He was just a guy looking vaguely around, as if he’d lost something. He put one ankle on his knee, nearly knocking the table over. He jiggled his legs.

“I got a grant,” he said.

She thought of Volfmann, his dark, angry voice. She remembered her brief fantasy of Tim kissing her. Tim was giving her a crooked, bashful smile. His cheeks had gone pink.

“Congratulations,” she said.

He had very dark, long eyelashes, like a child Harry’s age.

“A big, fat research grant,” he said, the tentative, self-conscious smile opening into an enormous grin. “Now I can do some big, fat research.” He gazed at his hands, still smiling, as if they were the future. He looked up at her. “You don’t know what this means. I mean, it means I can do my work. I can’t do my work like you, on a piece of paper. I need equipment . . . space . . .”

He was more emotional than Elizabeth had ever seen him. He shook his head in disbelief. He took a folded letter out of his pocket. He shook it open and stared at it.

“Tim, did you just get that? Did you just find out?”

He nodded. “I came here to celebrate. They have really good milk shakes.” He offered her a sip. “You want one? My treat.”

“I got a dog,” she said. “A little, skinny dog. A little, skinny brown mutt with two back toes missing. He jumped in the car when I picked Harry up from nursery school. His name is Temple. Brett hates him.”

“Congratulations on your dog.”

She looked at the bag with Josh’s sandwich in it. She was enjoying sitting at the café doing nothing, talking about nothing.

“Maybe it’s the dog I should congratulate,” he said. “You know, finding a home.”

She ordered an ice coffee at last. “I hope Josh isn’t getting too hungry.”

“Can I have his sandwich?” Tim asked. “Come on. We’ll get him another. He won’t know.”

Elizabeth glanced at him quickly, then looked away.

“Well, never mind,” he said.

“Take it, take it. The celebratory sandwich,” she said. She handed him the bag.

“You’re a good egg,” he said.

She thought, That’s the kind of thing Brett might say. And she wondered why she felt, suddenly, so sad.

When Elizabeth mentioned her new dog to Volfmann, he surprised her with his excitement. He wanted to know the dog’s name, how big it was, what color. His voice changed from the rough growl she had found so attractive to a low, melodious growl she found even more attractive.

“Are you a lady with a lapdog now? Or is he too big? Emma Bovary’s Italian greyhound was almost a lapdog, don’t you think?”

Any chance to drop a few literary allusions. And he obviously has a thing for strays.

“I’m really happy for you, Elizabeth. He just came out of the blue and found you. It’s beautiful. Have you read
My Dog Tulip?
Maybe you’ll fall in love, like J. R. Ackerley with his Alsatian . . .”

“He’s a mutt,” she said.

“Aren’t we all,” said Volfmann.

When she arrived home from her grandmother’s one day, she found a small gift-wrapped package on the steps. At first she thought it was for Harry, but a small label said
ELIZABETH.
She opened it right there. Inside was a tiny brass dog, obviously old, very heavy for its size, a paperweight, probably. It was a Pomeranian. The same breed as the lapdog in the Chekhov story.

Elizabeth held the dog to her face and felt the cool metal against her cheek. Volfmann had sent her a gift. There was no card. But there was no mistaking who had sent it. And why.

“That’s nice,” Brett said, when she came inside and he saw the little figure.

“I got myself a present,” she said. “To cheer myself up.”

A lapdog in the palm of my hand. My little secret, she thought. But her own words rang uncomfortably in her ears. So you didn’t tell him it was a present. It’s just a white lie, she told herself. But even as she reassured herself, she realized it was not lies that were bothering her. It was the words themselves. They were her mother’s words. I got myself a present, Greta had said. To cheer myself up. Then she’d held up her tourmaline ring. Her tourmaline ring just like the tourmaline rings Elizabeth had tried on at Fred Segal. When she saw Daisy Piperno.

Elizabeth had a swift, clear memory of Daisy grabbing a little gift box and stuffing it into her bag. A swift, clear memory of Daisy blushing. Daisy blushing and hiding a present she’d bought. For someone.

Elizabeth held the brass Pomeranian dog in the palm of her hand. Where does privacy end and secrecy begin? her mother had said. You are my private little gift, Elizabeth silently told the dog. My secret little gift. The ring was Greta’s secret gift. Elizabeth was sure of it. She stared at the Pomeranian. Volfmann had sent her a lapdog. It was beautifully detailed. It wore a little collar. Its eyes stared back at her.

“It won’t bite,” Brett said, but she was afraid he might be wrong.

She called Volfmann.

“You’re amazing,” she said.

“I’m a son of a bitch. And don’t forget it.”

“I’d say you’re more of a lapdog,” she said.

There was a short silence.

“Elizabeth? That is a peculiar remark.”

“It is?”

“Did you call for a reason?” he said.

“Just to thank you. And to say . . .” She paused. What did she want to say? “I don’t know. Can we meet for a drink?”