Greta said nothing. She seemed not even to have heard him. Elizabeth woke herself from her daydream about Volfmann, whose gruff voice she was imagining. It was saying, “This is marvelous, Elizabeth. Brilliant!” She woke herself and looked at her parents and wondered what the hell was going on. The two of them could have been separated by oceans, by continents.
“Mom? Hello?”
Greta turned to Elizabeth. Her face was hard and serious.
“Dad’s going to play golf in the rain,” Elizabeth said. “That’s very weird.”
“I’ve got cabin fever,” Tony said.
Greta sighed. Tears came to her eyes.
“Mom?”
“Go ahead,” she said, waving Tony off with one hand. With the other, she covered her eyes. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Tony said, rushing to the door. “I’m going out of my mind.”
The rain came down then, loud and sudden.
“I can’t help it,” Tony said.
Elizabeth heard the door slam. The car start. The rain pound on the roof.
“What’s eating him?” she said.
“He can’t help it,” Greta said softly. But Elizabeth heard the tight threat of tears even in that short sentence.
She tried to cheer her mother up. She made ice tea, but Greta barely touched it. She made a smoothie, but Greta did not even look at it.
“You’re going to get better,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s not that.”
What else could it be? “Is it Daddy?” she said.
Greta stared at her, then turned away and said she was tired and went into her room.
Elizabeth sat holding her mother’s smoothie. She sipped it. She experienced a weary and grimly dispassionate sense of helplessness, and she thought, dully, My father is having an affair.
Lotte sat in her favorite chair in her own apartment. Brett’s hands were strong and large and he had lowered her gently into the lounger. She watched him as he adjusted the television so she could see it.
“A gentleman,” she said. “And a scholar.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That and a nickel . . .”
Lotte liked Brett. He could be superior and cold, it was true. And he never mentioned how she looked unless prompted, but once given his cues, he usually acquitted himself well. How much more could she ask? He didn’t drink or gamble, like that bitch Stanley, how her poor sister had put up with him she never knew, not like her Morris, a model of a man, how God could have taken him and left all the gangsters on this earth . . .
“Tea?” Brett said.
“Just a little hot water.”
Brett stared at her as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Hot water?” he said, at last.
Lotte wondered if he was on drugs.
“Hot water,” she said. “In a mug.”
Brett went into the kitchen. She heard the flicker as the gas went on. She closed her eyes.
“What?” Brett said.
Lotte opened her eyes. He was standing before her with a mug.
“What?” she said.
“You said, ‘From Jericho to Kokomo.’”
“Did I?” If he heard her, why did he ask?
Brett handed her the mug of hot water. She sipped it, grateful for the warmth. Imagine if she were still in St. Louis, how cold it would be. Of course, it was August. St. Louis was hideously hot. And the humidity!
“Sit,” she said. “You’re making me nervous.”
Brett smiled. “Sorry.” He sat on the couch. He looked bored. Well, too bad, Lotte thought. I’m bored every day. Wait till you’re old, Mr. Professor.
“Can I get you anything else?” he said. “Or do you want me to turn on the television?”
“How old are you, Brett?”
“Thirty-three. Can you believe it?”
“Why aren’t you married to my granddaughter? I don’t understand this generation. I don’t understand anything anymore.” She held out her empty mug and closed her eyes. She felt Brett lift the cup from her grip.
“Elizabeth doesn’t want to. You’ve heard her on the subject.”
Lotte grunted.
“It’s not really necessary. You know what I mean?” Brett said. His voice faded slightly as he went into the kitchen.
“No,” Lotte said. “I don’t. But as long as you’re happy.”
“We’re happy,” Brett said.
“You should live and be well.” Lotte opened her eyes. He was back. She pointed at the remote control. Brett handed it to her. “That granddaughter of mine.”
“Mmm,” Brett said.
“Stubborn,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why won’t she wear her hair down?”
Brett laughed. “I struggle with that daily.”
Lotte pointed a finger at him. He could laugh if he wanted. But Lotte was no fool. “I know what I know,” she said.
Brett reached over and took the hand pointing at him in his own.
“Please don’t worry about us, Lotte,” he said. “Marriage is a technicality in the end, isn’t it?”
“That’s what all the boys say,” Lotte said. She let out a whoop and slapped her thigh.
“You just got out of the hospital?” Brett said. He had a nice smile. Lotte sat up a little straighter. “You’ll be dancing any minute!” he said. “You’re quite a . . .”
“Pistol!” Lotte said.
Brett nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “A pistol.”
Lotte looked at the newspaper. She couldn’t focus on it. There was very little she could focus on anymore. She remembered suddenly that she had cancer. They cut off half my nose, she thought.
“A pistol,” she said, shaking her finger at Brett.
“You look pretty goddamned good, Lotte. The interns were fighting over you, I hear.”
She smiled. It took Brett a while to warm up. That’s all.
“Thank you for bringing me home,” she said after a while. “Just make an honest woman of her and you’ll be perfect. Where the hell is she?”
“She’ll be here any minute,” he said.
Lotte could hear he was covering something up. Trouble in paradise. She could smell it. What was Elizabeth up to? These rotten kids. Never satisfied. Never sit still. She was married to Morris from the time she was nineteen years old. Now, divorce every time you turn around.
“She had a meeting,” he said.
“A meeting,” she said, snorting. “And my poor Greta with her filthy flu.” She grabbed his arm. “Tell me the truth.”
“She’s okay,” Brett said. “That is the truth.”
Lotte shook her head, disgusted and relieved. No one would tell her the truth. No one.
“Greta’s a trouper, Lotte. You know that.”
From Benzedrine to Ovaltine, Lotte heard herself saying. “It’s from a song.” From Jericho to Kokomo . . . Benzedrine to Ovaltine . . . She let her eyes close. After all, it had been a long day. She would take a little nap.
“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 ins
ide, 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
Elizabeth 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.
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