She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  “Madame Bovary,” he said. He sighed as he turned away and walked back to his office. “A franchise it’s not.”

  INT. GIRL’S BOARDING SCHOOL DORM—NIGHT

  We see a suite, two bedrooms, each with twin beds, off of a small common room, all of it messy and girly. Two sixteen-year-old girls, CARRIE and MOLLY, are sitting on the floor of the common room smoking a joint. A third girl, LAUREN, is listening to a Walkman, singing a Backstreet Boys song loud and off-key, and doing her nails. ANGLE ON the fourth girl, visible through the bedroom door. A dark-haired beauty, sitting in her bed in a short, white, simple, but revealing, nightgown. She is oblivious to the others. Somehow, she seems both innocent and bursting with sensuality. She is reading intently. . . . Wuthering Heights. She is BARBIE.

  The windows behind her are wide open, although it’s freezing cold and windy. WE SEE and HEAR the wind HOWLING through the trees.

  CU Barbie turns to windows. Dreamy-eyed from her book. Thrilled by the romantic wind.

  ANGLE ON common room. Papers flying, the three girls squealing, chasing their stuff.

  CARRIE

  God, Barbie, close your freaking windows!

  ANGLE ON Barbie, now leaning out the window, beautiful, the wind blowing her long hair. She turns, a pale pre-Raphaelite beauty, and looks pityingly at her roommates.

  BARBIE (harsh, angry)

  Shut the fuck up.

  She turns majestically back to the roaring wind.

  BARBIE (cont.) (whispers to herself)

  Pussies . . .

  “We’re not broke,” Brett said.

  He’d just come out of the shower. Drops of water clung between his shoulder blades. Elizabeth reached up and put her hand there. She was still in bed.

  “If you think the script is such a stupid idea,” he said, “you don’t have to do it. You really, really don’t.”

  “I don’t think it’s a stupid idea.”

  Brett buttoned his shirt. Elizabeth wondered why he always wore a dress shirt when he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “But you obviously do,” she said.

  “No. I think you’re being stupid about it.”

  “That’s what people do here. Pretend they hate what they’re doing. In case it’s stupid.”

  “That’s what stupid people do everywhere,” Brett said.

  He was dressed now, walking away from her, framed by the doorway to the hall. Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed. She saw her mother, lying down at the doctor’s office, scared and filling up with chemicals. She saw her grandmother, her face decaying as she tried on new hats.

  Brett! You can’t talk to me like that! she thought.

  “You’re not helping,” she said. She wanted him to help.

  Brett stopped and turned toward her. He must have seen something in her face.

  “Baby,” he said, putting his arms around her. “My baby.”

  Elizabeth felt tears coming.

  “Shit,” she said, “all I do is fucking cry.”

  Brett comforted her. As if he could comfort her. But he couldn’t, could he? And she realized that, at this moment, that was the reason she cried.

  Elizabeth wished she wouldn’t get so angry at Brett. What had he done? Nothing. Nothing at all. He deserved better. She would be nicer. Even Emma Bovary tried to be a good wife. In her fashion. She read poetry to Charles in the moonlight, hoping he would respond.

  Brett walked out the door, then came back. “It’s a mistake to confuse enthusiasm with weakness,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” He walked away, the damp from his back, between his shoulder blades, coming through his blue oxford shirt. “You, I guess.”

  Elizabeth drove toward her parents’ house with Harry, strapped into his car seat in the back and sucking on his pacifier. Their house is like my office, she told herself. I will do my work there. Madame Bovary will metamorphose into Mrs. B, a beautiful butterfly changing into an awkward, squirming caterpillar. She looked at Harry in the rearview mirror. He had brown, wavy hair like hers. He had brown eyes that were darker than hers and that sparkled with excitement and curiosity. When he scowled or smiled, he looked exactly like her. But now, gazing out the window, his face in repose, he looked like Brett, a calm and reasonable presence.

  “Look!” Harry said through his pacifier, pointing out the window at barefoot teenagers in wet suits carrying their boards toward the beach.

  “Surfers,” Elizabeth said.

  She thought that maybe Brett was right. He often was. She wanted to write Mrs. B and she should stop pretending she didn’t. She had become an academic because she liked to read novels and she didn’t know what else to do. It was not as though little children grew up wanting to be academics. They wanted to be firemen. Or stand-up comedians. Now, a miracle had occurred, a hand had reached out from the sky beckoning her from the thorny patch of critical theory and academic political infighting. Do not bite the hand that comes from the sky. Elizabeth liked working with Daisy better than she had with any of her university colleagues. They never called her Cookie. They never told her something she’d written sounded as bad as dialogue from an episode of CHiPs.

  Brett was right. The hand had beckoned and then graciously plucked her out of her thankless job and plunked her down in paradise. And, in addition to liking Daisy, who was so mysterious and so direct, in addition to liking Volfmann, who was so complicated and so brutish, Elizabeth liked Mrs. B. Yes, she was wet and romantic. Yes, she was self-indulgent and what Elizabeth’s father would have called a status seeker. But what was it she was really seeking? Happiness. That’s all. Just like everyone else.

  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Emma Bovary, founding father. No. Happiness, passion, intoxication. Like everyone in America. Funny that someone so French, so much a creature of the nineteenth century, could turn so easily into someone so American, and so contemporary. Searching for happiness just like everyone else.

  Am I searching for happiness, then? Elizabeth wondered.

  “Juice?” Harry said.

  She looked at him in the rearview mirror and thought how happy he made her. That wasn’t the happiness Madame Bovary sought. Perhaps she should have.

  “We’re almost there, sweetheart,” she said.

  As for passion and intoxication—weren’t they often horribly inconvenient? Just look at what happens to poor old Madame Bovary.

  “Juice!”

  Dead. Graphically, hideously dead by her own hand. The wages of a commonplace, romantic imagination.

  “Juice, juice, juice,” Harry sang softly.

  I want a truly modern, truly American Madame Bovary, she thought. The wages of a commonplace, therapeutic imagination. Emma and Charles and Leon and Rudolph, too, all at the couples’ counselor together while the child attends Gymboree!

  “Juice, juice, juice . . .”

  As she turned off Ocean Avenue she realized that she had not been to the beach once since coming to California. It had not even occurred to her. Harry had never been to a beach anywhere. She should be sitting in a beach chair, working and watching Harry dig holes and chase gulls.

  “Do you want to go to the beach, honey?” she said.

  “Juice,” Harry said.

  Elizabeth tried to work at her parents’ as often as she could. She felt the need to be near her mother, partly to be helpful if necessary, partly to breathe her mother’s air, to see what she saw, to hear the leaf blower and the mockingbird that Greta heard. Sometimes, Harry would play with his grandma. Other times, he simply wrapped himself around Elizabeth’s legs like a puttee. When he did play with his grandmother, Elizabeth worried that he tired Greta out. After all, he tired Elizabeth out, and she wasn’t getting chemotherapy. Greta never complained, though. She wasn’t a complainer. That fact had always been an important component of her personality, of her character.

  “Your mother’s not a complainer,” Elizabeth’s father would say.

  “M
y Greta, she never was a complainer,” Grandma Lotte would say.

  “How is anybody supposed to know what the hell is the matter if you never complain?” Elizabeth said.

  Greta looked up at the umbrella. There was a spiderweb at the top. It seemed to be holding the umbrella open. The sun had shifted and her left leg was exposed. She was too tired to move her leg, and she could as easily have moved the sun as moved the chaise. She heard Elizabeth’s sandals flip-flopping from the house. Elizabeth appeared and tilted the umbrella until it shaded all of her again. Greta felt her daughter’s lips on her forehead. She saw the dark circles beneath Elizabeth’s eyes. She felt her own eyes flutter as she attempted to keep them open. She heard Harry calling.

  “Mommy! Where’s my mommy?”

  She saw Elizabeth blink, then turn her head.

  “Okay. I’m here with Grandma.” Greta heard Elizabeth say this, though she spoke softly, too softly for Harry, surely, who was now wailing from inside the house.

  Greta closed her eyes. If she closed her eyes, Elizabeth would think she was asleep and could go to Harry without guilt. She wanted to thank Elizabeth for fixing the umbrella. But all she could do was close her eyes and release her.

  EXT. PERFECT FARMHOUSE—EVENING

  A celebration. Music, dancing, champagne . . . little children running among the elegantly dressed guests . . .

  EXTREME CLOSE-UP of a magnificent three-tiered wedding cake . . . the camera pans slowly up as if scaling a huge mountain . . . on the top WE SEE the figurines of the bride and groom . . .

  Suddenly, a HUGE KNIFE slashes into the cake . . .

  Lotte held out her hand for the mug of hot water. She forced her finger through the handle. “What that filthy arthritis did to my fingers . . . it should be executed . . .”

  “So where’s Norma?” Elizabeth said.

  Lotte looked away. People had no sense of privacy anymore. “Oh, she had to leave. You know how they are.”

  “Grandma, did you fire her?”

  “The tea is too hot, darling.”

  “It’s not tea.”

  “It’s water, Grandma!” Harry said.

  Elizabeth sat on the sofa and hung her head.

  “Why, why oh why, did you fire Norma?” she said.

  “Her food stank. To high heaven! How can they eat all those dirty spices? I don’t understand these people. Come, Harry, sit with Grandma. And the amounts? I would get sick as a dog if I ate what she ate. Mountains of food. Enough for an army. It was frightening! I was frightened, Elizabeth!”

  Lotte started to cry. Harry slid off the chair and reached for his toy trucks on the floor. I wasn’t really frightened, Lotte reminded herself, drying her tears, but I was certainly revolted.

  “Did she force you to eat her mountains of smelly food?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Oh! God forbid! She made me nice chicken soup. A little fillet of sole. Mashed potatoes I like, too . . .”

  Elizabeth went into the kitchen and came out eating a banana.

  “It’s not ripe, darling,” Lotte said. “It’s green. You’ll get a stomachache. God forbid.”

  “So, like, what kind of housekeeper would you like, exactly? You have to have someone, Grandma. You can’t do it yourself. That wouldn’t be fair to you. You deserve a little help after all these years, don’t you think?”

  Elizabeth was a thoughtful girl. But the hair . . .

  “Honey, why pull your hair back like that? Such beautiful hair . . .”

  Elizabeth turned the air-conditioning up.

  “Is that okay? I don’t know how you can stand it. It’s so stuffy.”

  She took Harry into the bedroom. Lotte heard the television. I still have my hearing, she thought. I still have my goddamned ears.

  “Elizabeth, why don’t you marry that nice husband of yours?” Lotte called from the living room.

  Elizabeth returned. “I don’t know. And he’s not my husband. And why do I have to? What difference does it make? Why does everyone care so much?”

  “Such a nice man.”

  “Maybe you need a husband, Grandma. Instead of a housekeeper.”

  Lotte gasped. “My husband, Morris, was my husband. No one could take his place. Men are pigs.”

  “There you go.”

  “My poor mother used to say what everyone needed was a wife. And you remember, Elizabeth, if that husband of yours ever gives you a hard time, let alone raises a hand to you, he should drop dead, you just turn on your heel and walk out. You remember your Grandma Lotte’s advice.”

  When Elizabeth and Harry had gone, Lotte stood by the window and looked out at the street until her legs were too sore. She sat stiffly in her chair and turned on the television. Cartoons. She fumbled with the remote, attacking it with her index finger, which was so thick and bent these days it seemed to her to have gotten on her hand by mistake. Finally, the channel changed. Bastard of a television. News. And all of it bad. Morris, she thought, you should not have left me alone in this world. Anger rose in her breast. Morris! I can’t live without you! Look what you did!

  She pushed the remote control some more until she found a channel she liked, then dialed Greta’s number.

  “The skating!” she said to the answering machine. “Like ballerinas!”

  Sometimes Elizabeth and Harry stayed for dinner with Greta and Tony and Josh, particularly when Brett was out of town. He flew to Washington every few weeks, and Elizabeth had at first looked forward to eating with her parents. There had been a time when dinner at her mother’s had been a treat, a break from her own boring, moderately successful, low-fat, jarringly spiced cooking to her mother’s soothing, tasty stews and roasts. Now she stayed out of loyalty, for her mother insisted on cooking but had no appetite. Greta found the aroma of food offensive and nauseating. Boiled potatoes or white rice were acceptable. Sometimes a poached chicken breast. Elizabeth made milk shakes and smoothies and Greta tried to drink them, just to be agreeable. She never got very far, but Elizabeth would watch every sip with a kind of hysterical satisfaction.

  “Good!” she would say. “That’s so good! Thank you.”

  And her mother would smile weakly back at her. “Good,” she would answer, putting the glass down with obvious relief, pushing it, still almost full, away from her. “Thank you.”

  To Catch a Thief. The King and I. The Philadelphia Story. The Killers. Whatever was on. Elizabeth knew much of the dialogue by heart. She would sit in her parents’ den after dinner and wait eagerly for certain scenes, anticipating each gesture leading up to them. But often she would be distracted by something she had never noticed. In the small-town sheriff’s office, when Edmond O’Brien, the insurance inspector, asks about Burt Lancaster’s suicide, he stands in front of a window. Outside the window, several men are washing a fire truck. Elizabeth stared at the fire truck and the men and the rags they rubbed across it. She had never seen the fire truck there before. How could that be? How could movies be infinite?

  Her father was out of the house even more than usual, using work as an excuse, but when he was home, he sat with her and watched movies. He looked grim and strained and smiled inappropriately, his hands heavy in his lap, his eyes soft-focused on some private scene. Elizabeth remembered how, when she was very small, she used to think the Sick was an exotic person of great importance and stature, like the czar. But now that Greta was the Sick, where was Tony’s hearty reverence, his loyal comrade-in-arms energy? Instead, he held his own hands, as if he were his own patient.

  He doesn’t really know, she told herself. Worry is not knowing.

  Lotte asked, “Where’s Greta?”

  She motioned Elizabeth to the refrigerator, in which there was a plate covered with plastic wrap that held a slice of white bread, the crusts removed, topped with a thin slice of porcelain pale turkey. Lotte had prepared it ahead of time for Elizabeth.

  “I miss my Greta,” Lotte said. Her voice became increasingly petulant, childish. “Where is my Gretala today?”

&nb
sp; Gretala is home puking, Elizabeth wanted to say. She’s getting chemotherapy because she, too, has cancer, but she doesn’t want to worry you because she is generous and brave, Grandma, so get off her back.

  “Mom’s got the flu,” she said, instead. “Remember? She doesn’t want you to catch it.”

  “The flu? Again? My God, my God . . .”

  “Well, really just a cold. Mom has a cold. She’s fine. She’s resting today, that’s all. I’m here.”

  “You, you’re a wonderful, wonderful girl. Why aren’t you home with your family?”

  “I am with my family. You.”

  “Your mother should take better care of herself.”

  Elizabeth nodded. She tried to eat the turkey sandwich. Her grandmother was very proud of her turkey sandwiches.

  “No crusts,” Lotte said. “Pretty snazzy.” She motioned for Elizabeth to drink her tea. “The flu . . .” She shook her head, her forehead wrinkled with concern. “It’s a sad thing,” she said. “Frightening . . .”

  “She’s okay, Grandma. Really.”

  “. . . a sad thing, Elizabeth, to be so dependent,” Grandma Lotte continued. Her voice slid into a wail. “To count on your daughter the way I do . . .”

  Elizabeth stared at Lotte, speechless.

  “You cannot rely on anyone,” Lotte said, shaking her head sadly.

  As Lotte muttered and clucked her tongue and ran through the errands she could entrust only to Greta, Elizabeth pulled herself together, nodded occasionally, and stopped listening. She wondered if the Flu was a lie or a white lie. It was Lotte who had originally introduced her to the concept of a white lie. One afternoon when Elizabeth was a little girl, she had been home with Lotte at her grandparents’ house in St. Louis. The phone rang.

  “You get that for Grandma,” Lotte said. “Good Tizzie. If it’s Renie Blum, tell her Grandma’s in bed with a migraine headache . . .”

  “But —”