She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

“. . . and she can’t play cards tonight.”

  “But you’re not,” Elizabeth said, as the phone rang, jangling, louder and louder, it seemed, threatening her moral standing with each new peal.

  “I could be,” Lotte said. She pushed Elizabeth to the kitchen wall where the phone was mounted.

  It was Renie Blum. Elizabeth held the receiver, hesitated, watched her grandmother gesturing for her to get on with it.

  “She’s lying down. In bed,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t particularly like Renie Blum, who smelled of cigarette smoke. “Grandma has a headache.” And Elizabeth thought playing cards was a waste of time, having heard as much from her mother many times over the years.

  “Oy! A migraine?”

  “Yeah. Grandma has a migraine headache and she’s lying down in bed and she can’t go out tonight.”

  Renie made worried sounds.

  “She said to say she’s very sorry,” Elizabeth added.

  Grandma Lotte sighed with relief as she hung the phone up for Elizabeth, who could not reach the cradle.

  “But it was a lie,” Elizabeth said. “You made me tell a lie.” And she began to cry. She had lied before. What child hasn’t? But since this was not her idea and did her no good, it seemed a wasted lie, a sin squandered, throwing good money, or in this case bad money, after bad.

  “I lied!” She wailed and sobbed, and Grandma Lotte, looking confused and rather annoyed, held her in her arms and explained that it was a white lie.

  “Grandpa and I were invited to the club. So I can’t see Renie tonight, can I? Should I hurt her feelings and explain that to her? Renie might think I was insulting her, you see? You don’t want me to hurt her feelings, do you?”

  Elizabeth sat on Lotte’s lap, her eyes swollen, her nose stuffed. “I lied,” she said. But she was tired of crying, tired of Lotte’s powdery scent, her iron-strong arms with their soft, paper-white skin.

  “You told a white lie,” Lotte said. “A white lie is a lie you tell to protect someone else’s feelings.”

  Lotte offered Elizabeth the coveted red Life Saver. “It’s a nice lie,” she said, patting her granddaughter.

  “The dirty goddamned bitch of a flu,” Lotte said now. “Your mother should know better.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Hitler should feel the way I feel . . . with a daughter with the flu, that gangster.”

  She glared at Elizabeth.

  “Adolf Hitler,” she said.

  Elizabeth was now the one who usually took her grandmother for radiation treatments. The first time that Greta called and said she didn’t think she could manage to do it, Elizabeth told herself how pleased she was that Greta was able to ask for a little help. But she was also shocked. Her mother had never, as long as she could remember, begged off of anything.

  In the waiting room of the radiation clinic, caked red deformities sat crusting on faces, necks, arms, and legs. Grandma Lotte, incredibly, seemed not to notice.

  “It’s so hot, a person could expire,” she said.

  “Take off your sweater, Grandma.”

  Lotte looked at her, hurt.

  “It looks so great,” Elizabeth added quickly. “It would be a shame to take it off.”

  “A crime,” Lotte said.

  Elizabeth tried to make her grandmother comfortable on the hard table where the preliminary laser measurements would be made. The soft-spoken Pakistani radiologist asked Lotte to lie motionless. He explained that he would have to mark her face with tiny blue dots—tattoos. Lotte began to cry. Elizabeth herself felt the room swirling, the darkening blur of fear, her throat closing. She gripped the hard X-ray table with one hand, stroked her grandmother’s arm with her other, until, ordered out by the radiologist, she found a water fountain and took a Xanax.

  Eventually, they put Lotte’s face in a mold.

  “Lie absolutely still, madam,” the radiologist said.

  “Aachoo!”

  The mold slipped to the left. A blink. It slipped to the right. A moan. Another sneeze. Over and over, the mold shifted, and the radiologist made adjustments. After several visits, all was ready, and the treatment began in earnest. Elizabeth helped Lotte onto the table. She looked at her grandmother’s face. The little blue dots were dwarfed by burgeoning scarlet swellings.

  “Tattoos,” Elizabeth said, “are very hip.”

  Lotte faced the ceiling, the soft creases of her cancerous skin shining with the trail of tears.

  “Next we’ll have to get your nipples pierced.”

  “Feh!” Lotte said.

  Elizabeth had wanted to gather her grandmother up in her arms and rock her like a baby. She had wanted to put a pillow over Lotte’s distorted face and smother her. I can’t take it, she thought. Too much sickness. Too much responsibility. And I can’t take it that I can’t take it. It’s pitiful. I’m pitiful. I’m not the one who’s sick. I’m the one who whines and complains about caring for those I love. You don’t have cancer, Elizabeth, she told herself. So shut the fuck up. You’re blessed with health. You’re blessed with people you love enough to want to help. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

  “Haa-aah-CHOO.”

  Lotte’s mask flew off.

  And Elizabeth trembled with love and rage.

  “It’s okay, Grandma,” she said, letting Lotte clutch her hand with her iron grip.

  I’m not a nurse! she thought. I am not a fucking nurse.

  And she squeezed her grandmother’s hand back.

  Greta opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep on the sofa. The pattern of the upholstery loomed, huge, preposterous, beyond her nose. She felt the cat at her feet.

  “Ooh, you sweet thing,” she murmured, pushing her feet beneath the warm body.

  “How do you do?” someone said. “Greta, I presume.”

  Greta sat up, slowly, the way she had accustomed herself to moving these days. She saw a woman sitting at the foot of the couch. The woman held a cigarette. A silky loop of smoke wafted idly over her head. The woman eyed her with heavy lidded eyes. Held a hand out to shake.

  There was no cat on the couch. Greta’s feet were wedged beneath the woman’s buttocks. Greta could feel the curve of the flesh, the warmth.

  She leaned forward to take the woman’s hand, smiling politely. It was her house, after all, and this woman was her guest. She wondered if she should pull her feet out from beneath the guest. It might bring attention to her feet and to their placement. And would it be rude? Greta had always thought of herself as hospitable.

  As a compromise, she pulled her feet out in what she hoped was a hospitable manner.

  “I thought you were the cat,” she said.

  The woman continued looking at her in her odd, sidelong way. “I read that cats cause schizophrenia,” she said.

  “That explains a lot,” Greta said, feeling disloyal to her cat as she spoke, coughing suddenly on her own saliva, on her own words. Poor Moochie, who kept her feet warm at night and followed her loyally through the house like a small mewling dog. She tried to stop coughing, but the effort only triggered more. She was coughing in earnest, the kind of embarrassing cough usually reserved for the theater or a library.

  The woman seemed suddenly to notice her cigarette.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry.” She looked around for an ashtray. “Shit.”

  She got up and Greta heard her turning on the water in the kitchen sink. She called out, “Stay put.”

  Stay put. What an interesting expression. Stay put. As if we had been purposefully “put” where we were. And we could choose to continue in that place. Or not.

  The woman came back without the cigarette and with a glass of water. She was somewhere around thirty-five, Greta thought. Maybe a few years younger. She handed Greta the glass and sat on the coffee table facing her. Greta sipped gratefully, although she no longer drank water, certainly not tap water, and thought the woman almost mad for offering it.

  “What a fucked up piece of shit I am,” Greta’s unexpected guest kept saying.
“Schizophrenia? I mean you’ve got fucking lung cancer!”

  “You really shouldn’t drink this,” Greta said, pointing to the glass.

  “Water?”

  “Colon,” Greta added, “by the way.”

  They looked at each other, both embarrassed, and then burst out laughing. Greta felt as if she hadn’t laughed in months. She was sure she hadn’t. She felt their self-conscious laughter unaccountably accelerate. She watched herself and this strange woman laugh at nothing.

  “Who . . . who the hell are you?” she said when she finally could speak.

  The woman wiped her eyes with her shirttail, flashing a strip of stomach.

  “Daisy,” she said. “Daisy Piperno.”

  In the car, Elizabeth looked out the window and tried to figure out where she was. Josh was driving. Harry was asleep in the back.

  “So who sleeps more?” Josh asked. “Him or Mom?”

  Elizabeth looked back at Harry in sudden fear.

  “He’s just a baby,” she said, her voice shrill. “He’s supposed to sleep.”

  Josh turned to give her a disgusted look. “What is with you?”

  Elizabeth slumped in her seat. “Where are we?” She had no idea, although she had taken this route to Grandma Lotte’s so many times.

  “Like, Century City, I guess,” he said. “Did Grandma fire the new one? Yet?”

  Elizabeth shook her head no.

  They rode in silence the rest of the way.

  Inside Lotte’s lobby, they found Lotte waiting for them.

  “Why should you come all the way up to the apartment?” she said. “We can sit right here. Let them pay for the air-conditioning. We’ll have our visit.”

  Harry sat on Lotte’s lap, sulky from his interrupted nap, his pacifier in his mouth. Elizabeth sat on the couch and massaged Grandma’s large hand, hoping that would somehow exempt her from having to make conversation. Josh sat on Lotte’s other side. He was better at small talk, less self-conscious than Elizabeth.

  The chairs in the lobby were not very comfortable. Elizabeth wanted to leave and felt guilty for it. Her grandmother was wearing a turquoise sundress. She was also wearing her bedroom slippers. Not a good sign.

  “I got lice once,” Grandma Lotte was saying, part of a conversation Elizabeth had long lost track of. “Mama washed my hair with lye.”

  Harry pulled his pacifier out.

  “Jacob got lice,” he said. “At his school. He’s a big boy.”

  “You could eat him up,” Lotte cried. She clapped her hands and Harry watched, wide-eyed, as her bracelets crashed before his eyes.

  Elizabeth envied Grandma her slippers. She wanted to take her shoes off. Had they stayed long enough? It was never long enough—a horrible, ungenerous thought which she tried to shake. She wondered if they were meeting in the lobby because Grandma had, indeed, fired her latest housekeeper. She knew she should find out. But she preferred not to.

  Greta noticed her surprise visitor, Daisy Piperno, unconsciously reach for a cigarette from her bag, then pull her hand away from the pack.

  “Daisy Piperno,” Greta said, enjoying the sound of the name. “The hot young director, yes?”

  “I’m a director, anyway.”

  “And young,” Greta insisted. “And certainly very . . .” For a moment, she felt as though she were lost inside her own body, light-headed and confused.

  Daisy, leaning back into the couch, resting one ankle on the other knee, her sandal dangling from her foot, said, very softly, “Thanks. You’re pretty hot yourself.”

  By the time Elizabeth and Josh and Harry came back from Lotte’s, Greta had made ice tea and taken Daisy to look at her garden in the back of the house. They had a pleasant discussion about native grasses, about which Daisy knew quite a bit.

  “I sat on your mother to wake her up,” Daisy said. “Then I blew secondhand smoke at her. She’s quite resilient.”

  “She never complains,” Elizabeth said.

  Greta watched them go into Tony’s study to work.

  “She makes dee-vine ice tea,” she heard Daisy say.

  I do, actually, Greta thought. First make strong tea. Let it cool, or it will get cloudy. Put a lot of ice in it. Add lemon last. A lot of lemon . . . Greta realized she was thinking of food, or at least a beverage, was thinking of taste, with pleasure.

  Josh was running through the house with Harry on his back.

  My children are home, Greta thought. And my grandson. I have a devoted husband. I’m feeling better today. I can drink ice tea. I have enough energy to make ice tea. I’m very lucky.

  She grabbed Josh and Harry and kissed their foreheads.

  Elizabeth looked back at her mother. She must be feeling better. She was back in her old uniform. In her jeans and white T-shirt and bare feet, and so thin from the chemo, Greta looked like a kid. Greta was so happy today. Her mother’s happiness filled the house like an exotic perfume. Elizabeth tried to share in it, to breathe it in, to push away the thought of how easily it could disappear.

  Moochie the cat jumped up beside her on the couch. He curled up between her and Daisy. He began to purr. She watched the cat hair float through the air, past her laptop screen, past Daisy, lit by the deep afternoon sun.

  EXT. DECK OF EXPENSIVE MALIBU BEACH HOUSE—EVENING

  Barbie is curled in a chair, like a cat, or a snake. She blows languid smoke rings. The cigarette dangles in her hand, glowing in the deep blue of evening.

  Below her, on the beach, a fabulously handsome guy jogs toward her. He is LEO, an actor who lives several houses down. He looks up.

  Their eyes lock.

  Barbie blows another smoke ring. It hangs between them as he passes, running slowly down the beach.

  Greta looked at the open door leading to Tony’s study where the two girls sat, hunched solemnly over a laptop computer.

  “Why does everything I write sound like parody?” Elizabeth was saying.

  “Well, this scene is parody in the novel,” Daisy said. She flipped through her paperback translation of Madame Bovary and read out loud. “‘This is how they wanted to be, each of them imagining an ideal toward which they would now readjust their past lives.’ It’s parody, that’s why it’s parody.”

  Greta came closer and stood in the doorway. Daisy looked up and saw her there and held her gaze for what seemed to Greta a long time, then turned back to the novel.

  “Besides,” Daisy read, her voice holding the words, then gently letting them go, or so it seemed at that moment to Greta, “‘the spoken word is like a rolling machine . . .’” She looked up at Greta again. “‘. . . that draws feelings out.’”

  “Mom?” Elizabeth had noticed her. “What’s up?”

  “Anyone for ice tea?” Greta said.

  She looked Daisy up in the telephone book. She had no idea why. She didn’t plan to call her.

  There it was: Daisy Piperno. Only one with that name, certainly. She examined the number, feeling weirdly guilty, as if she were spying on the girl.

  When Elizabeth arrived that day, Greta said, “How is your work going?”

  Elizabeth shrugged.

  “Is Daisy a help?”

  “At least she has some idea of what she’s doing.”

  “Don’t you?” Greta said.

  Elizabeth gave her a warning look.

  Greta offered her a cup of coffee, which seemed to mollify her. “Where’s Harry?”

  “I made Brett take him to the beach.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Elizabeth looked up from the newspaper, making sure there was no undercurrent to Greta’s words.

  “It’s nice,” Greta said.

  “I can’t do it myself.”

  Greta thought she ought to change the subject. “Is Daisy meeting you here today?”

  “I want to. You think I don’t want to go to the beach? I can’t do everything,” Elizabeth said. She got up, almost in tears, and left the kitchen.

  “What’s she ragging on about?”
Josh said, as Elizabeth almost knocked him over in the doorway.

  “Shut up!” Elizabeth yelled from the other room.

  Greta watched Josh pour coffee, watched the milk slosh out of the cup onto the counter. What is she ragging on about? she wondered. Why does Josh tease her so much? Is Daisy coming today? Josh put the empty carafe back on the coffeemaker’s burner.

  “Sink,” Greta said.

  She went into the study and sat on the arm of the chair Elizabeth was curled up in.

  “I’m such a wacko,” Elizabeth said, wiping tears from her face.

  “You’re high-strung,” Greta said.

  Elizabeth looked up, gratefully.

  “You’re not supposed to be consoling me,” Elizabeth said. “I’m selfish and self-indulgent and I’m not helping you.”

  “I’m feeling better today,” Greta said. “Get it while the getting’s good.”

  She stroked Elizabeth’s hair while Elizabeth tapped on her laptop.

  “Isn’t Daisy coming today?” Greta said. “I liked her.”

  “Nope.”

  Elizabeth tapped away. Greta rubbed her daughter’s head, feeling the shape of Elizabeth’s skull, familiar beneath her hand.

  Lotte knew what she knew. You didn’t have to be Dr. Ruth, that little midget, to see it. Anyone with eyes in their head could tell: There was something off about the marriage. They weren’t even married. That was the first clue.

  Elizabeth held Harry, who had slipped and fallen. He sobbed into her breast as she knelt before him, her arms encircling his little body.

  “I’ll go get the car,” Brett said.

  “Do that,” Elizabeth said, her voice bitter and sarcastic.

  Lotte saw that Brett looked shocked. What had he done? He had offered to get the car so they wouldn’t have to walk. What was wrong with that? Stupid man. Nothing was wrong with that. But who was left holding the crying baby? Couldn’t he see that?

  “Harry, you want to come with Daddy to get the car?” Brett said.

  Well! Lotte had always liked this Brett. He had a head on him, after all.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Elizabeth said.