She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  “Something to drink?” a waiter asked.

  Greta barely noticed him. She said, “Martini.” Because she was out of the habit, she forgot to say, “Vodka.”

  She sipped the martini.

  “It’s gin,” she said.

  There was no one to hear her. Gin makes me drunk, she thought. Which is, perhaps, just as well. She began to shiver. She had kicked off her sandals and now could not locate the left one with her foot. She bent down beneath the table. There it was. She watched her foot slide in. When she sat up, she half expected Daisy to be standing there watching her, amused, with that funny expression of detached curiosity. But Daisy wasn’t there.

  Daisy entered the bar a few minutes later. Greta saw her turn toward another part of the room. She stood up and walked toward Daisy, noticing her back, her shoulders, bare and smooth, the tight fabric of her pants, the curve of her thigh, a flash of skin at her ankle. She thought, I’m staring at her ass. She caught up to Daisy. She put her hand gently on the small of Daisy’s back. Greta felt Daisy’s skin as her shirt twisted from beneath her fingers, as Daisy turned to face her.

  “Hi, you,” Daisy said.

  Greta kissed Daisy on the lips.

  She felt Daisy’s lips with her lips. She saw the surprise in Daisy’s eyes with her eyes. With her own body, she sensed Daisy’s body press closer to her.

  Daisy let out a quiet laugh and stepped back.

  Was Daisy laughing at her? But Daisy was not laughing at Greta. Daisy was blushing. God bless you, Greta thought. You sweet, innocent little vamp. Greta had startled Daisy. This delighted her.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said when they were sitting at the table.

  Daisy nodded, biting her lip in an exceptionally delicate and appealing way. Daisy leaned forward on her elbows. Her hands, which were small and ladylike, were spread out on the table.

  “Daisy, I know this is crazy . . .”

  Greta stopped because it rhymed. Daisy seemed not to have noticed. “Look, I . . .” Greta stopped again. “Do you want a drink?” she said. She waved at the waiter, pointed at her martini. “Martini okay? It’s gin. Gin makes me drunk.”

  “Good,” Daisy said. She had stopped blushing.

  Does she mean the martini is good, or me drunk is good?

  They looked at each other across the table. Daisy said nothing. Greta felt dizzy. “I’m married,” she said.

  “I’m not,” Daisy said.

  “I could be your mother,” Greta said.

  “No, you couldn’t,” Daisy said. “And you’re not.”

  “I’ve never done this before,” Greta said.

  “I have,” Daisy said.

  Greta held the stem of her glass. She saw Daisy’s hands on the table. She watched as her own hand moved, slid down the stem, onto the tabletop, across the table. Those were her fingertips touching Daisy’s fingertips. Their hands were moving. Her hand slid to Daisy’s wrist. Daisy’s fingers touched the inside of her wrist. The waiter brought Daisy’s drink and Greta wondered what she, Greta Bernard, married to Dr. Anthony Bernard for thirty-two years, was doing drunk in a bar at three in the afternoon straining toward the mouth of a young woman across the table from her as a waiter set down a chilled martini with too many olives.

  I’m acting out, she thought. Because I have cancer. What am I trying to prove? That I’m alive? Couldn’t I take up oil painting instead?

  “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I first saw you,” Daisy said. “Sleeping.”

  And then Greta thought, I have always wanted to kiss this woman. My whole life. And now I know it. And now I will. And she pressed her lips against Daisy’s again, tasting a kiss that made her drunk.

  When she kissed Daisy good-bye, outside the bar, Greta kept her eyes open, not wanting to let go of any one of the five senses of Daisy. She breathed Daisy in, she tasted gin and olives and Daisy, she felt the warmth and novelty of full, feminine breasts pressed against her own. She heard Daisy breathe and watched as Daisy, too, kept her eyes open, barely, hooded and alert.

  Now Greta was driving to Lotte’s with Elizabeth beside her in the car. She realized she must have made some sound, seductive and predatory, just remembering that moment, for Elizabeth was asking what was wrong.

  “Wrong?” Greta said.

  “I don’t know. Forget it. You’re in another world.”

  Elizabeth turned on the radio, then, almost immediately, off.

  Forget it, Greta thought. If only I could. She sped up to make a yellow light and sensed Elizabeth stiffening beside her.

  “And you’re kind of tailgating,” Elizabeth said.

  “I was driving before you were born.”

  Greta patted her daughter’s knee to reassure her. Elizabeth took her mother’s hand and placed it carefully back on the wheel.

  Kougi, Kougi, lend me your comb, Elizabeth sang when they pulled into the garage and parked in a visitor spot. She thought, Am I getting like Grandma?

  Her mother stared at the concrete wall in front of them.

  “Mom?”

  “Don’t hate me,” Greta said.

  “What?”

  “Please,” Greta added, politely.

  “Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Since you said please.” And she laughed. But she wondered, too. Her mother was still gazing vaguely forward, as if they were on the road, driving.

  “Mom? We’re here.”

  Greta turned to her. “I love you and Josh more than anything in the world,” she said. Then she smiled her big smile. “Okay!” she said, as if she’d just stepped out into the fresh air. She took a deep breath. “Off we go!”

  Kougi answered the door wearing a yellow slicker. He had just given Lotte her shower.

  “How is she?” Elizabeth said.

  “Your grandmother has great inner strength,” Kougi said. “And she moved her bowels today!”

  He led Elizabeth and Greta into the living room where Lotte sat in a bathrobe, her cane balanced against the arm of her favorite chair.

  “Elizabeth!” Lotte cried. She received her granddaughter’s embrace. “You brought Greta.” She eyed Greta attentively. “You look pale.”

  “You look great, Mother,” Greta said, laughing, kissing the good side of her face.

  Lotte nodded, as if to say, What did you expect? She grabbed Greta’s hands and kissed them. “Your health, your health,” she murmured.

  “Okay, okay,” Elizabeth said. “We’re all here, aren’t we?”

  “Did you hear the news?” Lotte said.

  “You had a bowel movement?” Greta said.

  “No!”

  “You didn’t have a bowel movement?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Well then,” Elizabeth said.

  “The news is that Kougi is going to Japan.”

  Elizabeth thought she might throw up. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

  She sat down on the couch and flung her head back, hitting the wall with a thud. She rubbed the back of her head. She could feel the egg already.

  Her mother went into the kitchen.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” Lotte drew out the word “God” as if it were elastic.

  “Grandma, it’s okay.”

  Kougi came in with a tray of green tea in tiny Japanese cups.

  “She bumped her head, Kougi!”

  “Perhaps she has great inner strength, like you,” Kougi said.

  Lotte thought this idea over and liked it.

  “Thank God, thank God. That’s all I can say,” Lotte said. “With the world the way it is, full of dirty rotten bastards, they should rot in hell.”

  Greta appeared with a plastic bag of ice. “You’re going to Japan?” she said to Kougi, her voice weary. She put the bag on Elizabeth’s head.

  He nodded.

  “And he’s taking me with him!” Lotte said. If you want to know who we are, she sang out suddenly, we are gentlemen of Japan . . .

  On many a vase and jar, sang Kougi. On ma
ny a screen and fan . . .

  Elizabeth’s mother took the bag of ice back and put it over her eyes.

  “There, there, Mommy,” Elizabeth said.

  We figure in lively paint . . . Lotte sang.

  Our attitude’s queer and quaint, the two sang together. You’re wrong if you think it ain’t . . .

  Elizabeth spent the afternoon helping Lotte with her bills while Greta napped on her mother’s bed.

  “She works too hard,” Lotte said. “You all work too hard.”

  Kougi was not going to Japan for another year, and if Lotte was still alive in a year, then why shouldn’t she go to Japan? And why shouldn’t she be alive in a year, for that matter? She seemed so much better. Kougi, it turned out, could not only sing Gilbert and Sullivan, but also make Cream of Wheat with the best of them. He massaged Lotte’s feet. He even tamed her depressing houseplants. The plants had first arrived in the house when Lotte began to get sick, cheerful gifts from well-wishers welcoming Lotte home from each hospital visit. Another tumor, another begonia. Lotte had never had any patience for plants before. Plants grew in dirt and were, therefore, dirty. But the gift plants lingered, collecting dust and mites, sprawling in ugly neglected tangles. Until Kougi arrived and made them beautiful again. If that were possible, why couldn’t Grandma Lotte live into next year and make her journey to Japan?

  Elizabeth watched her grandmother sort through her bills.

  “I am meticulous,” Lotte said.

  She took out her checkbook. It was held closed by a rubber band. Scraps of paper with phone numbers and notes were stuffed inside. Lotte laboriously wrote out each check.

  “I used to have an exquisite signature,” she said.

  “I’ll do it for you, Grandma,” Elizabeth said, more than once. “That’s why I came, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not dead yet,” Lotte said. She concentrated on her signature. Slowly, the pen made the familiar loops. Elizabeth watched them unfold, wobbly, but still recognizable as the handwriting of so many birthday checks. Her grandmother’s hands were huge. They were pale and bony with arthritis. They labored over their task, leaving behind their old-fashioned penmanship. Lotte Franke. Elizabeth stared at the name, at the passion and ardor and diligence.

  “Damn hands,” Lotte said, throwing the pen on the table and shaking out her cramped fingers.

  “Damn arthritis,” Kougi said. “Brave hands.”

  “Brave hands,” Elizabeth repeated.

  Lotte fanned her hands out in front of her eyes and looked at them tenderly.

  “The bastards,” she said.

  From the side of the pool of Greta and Tony’s house, which sat high up on a terraced hill, Greta could see her neighbors, two women and two huskies in the driveway below. She wondered if the two dogs in the French chateau-style house next door dreamed at night of pulling sleds. But if there were any sleds in Santa Monica, she was sure the sleds would have been engaged by the doting owners to pull the dogs. Pet talk drifted up from the neighbors’ driveway. “Come here, little sweet baby dog puppy, come to Mommy who loves you, little prettiest girl-girl . . .”

  For the first time it occurred to Greta that the women were lesbians. She watched the women fuss over the two big dogs.

  “I want a dog,” she said, startling herself.

  “You do?” Tony said.

  “Do I?” Greta said, looking around at the others for help.

  Tony stared at her, then gathered up his towel. He swatted an insect away. “Golf,” he said, and left.

  “Those women treat their dogs like children,” Brett said.

  “Should they treat them like adults?” Greta said.

  She felt suddenly protective of her neighbors, although when she overheard them cooing at the dogs before she’d found them excessive and saccharine.

  “Mom, do you really want a dog?” Elizabeth said. Greta saw she was thinking of the dog as possibly therapeutic, like ice tea.

  “You have a grandchild,” Brett said.

  “I’m not a dog,” Harry said.

  “Of course not,” said Elizabeth.

  “I have no doubt they send their dogs off to doggie day care,” Brett said. “Why do people get a dog if they have no time to spend with it?”

  “Don’t you want Harry to go to preschool?” Elizabeth asked Brett, alarmed.

  I don’t want my children to hate me, Greta thought. It’s as simple as that. And they will hate me. They would be well within their rights to hate me. I will hate me. I will be hateful, the scarlet woman, the selfish and self-indulgent midlife crisis who betrayed their father.

  “Elizabeth! Harry’s not a dog! That’s my whole point,” Brett said.

  They all looked at Harry, who was digging holes in the grass and burying Cheerios.

  And what about their father? What about Tony? Greta thought. She watched the neighbors as they successfully loaded the dogs into the backseat of their Mercedes SUV, strapping the two huskies in with special seat belts. A decent, no, a wonderful man who has always been loyal and kind and loving. She couldn’t go on with this. It was wrong. It was cruel. It was impossible.

  “A dog and an SUV,” she said. That would have to be enough.

  “You have an SUV,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’m a dog!” Harry said, rolling in the grass. He barked several times, then sat at the edge of the pool and splashed with his feet.

  Greta watched the two women get in the car and drive off. Brett had turned irritably away from the neighbors. It suddenly bothered Greta that neither of the women was terribly attractive.

  Elizabeth got up and took Harry into the water.

  Greta looked at Brett. There was a smear of sunscreen on the lens of his sunglasses.

  “It must be hard not to have children,” he said.

  Greta thought, What will you say about me, Brett?

  Nothing. Because you will never know.

  “I mean, it’s what life is all about,” Brett said.

  “Don’t be smug,” Elizabeth said from the pool.

  A dog, Greta thought. A secret lesbian dog. For a secret lesbian.

  She still wasn’t sure what that meant. That she was in love with Daisy? That in the few days since that kiss in the bar, as she and Daisy plotted to get together, Greta had not stopped thinking of her? That she noticed women wherever she went, even the nurses at the doctor’s office, the lines of their undergarments showing through slippery nylon uniforms? She had spent so long being Tony’s wife and Elizabeth and Josh’s mother. Had she been a lesbian all this time? All the time she’d been married and in love with Tony? Because she had been in love with Tony. She had looked into his eyes and felt her heart beat wildly, felt her knees weaken.

  “What do they do?” Lotte would invariably ask when any mention of homosexuality was made. “That’s my question. That’s what I want to bring out. What do they do?”

  What do they do? Greta thought. She smiled. She closed her eyes.

  “Mom, don’t you think that’s smug?” Elizabeth was saying from the pool.

  “Don’t be smug, Brett,” Greta murmured obediently. But her eyes remained closed, the hint of a smile, lingering and coy, on her slightly parted lips.

  In the pool, Elizabeth bobbed up and down holding Harry. His arms were around her neck. Don’t be smug, she told herself. She had noticed, off and on, that the happier Brett got, the more self-satisfied he got. Was that a normal progression? A natural chemical reaction, like ice melting into water and water boiling into steam? Perhaps, at this very moment, as Brett was lounging by the pool, he was imagining himself buckling his son into a Mercedes SUV. The little boy would be just as important an element in that fantasy picture of successful adulthood as the SUV: no less, certainly, but no more.

  “Harry’s not a symbol,” she said. “He’s not a trophy of functioning adulthood.”

  Brett did not hear her.

  “I told you, I’m a dog,” Harry said.

  Elizabeth wondered if she should give Barbie
Bovaine a dog instead of a daughter. Indifference to one’s child, even cruelty to children, had become old hat in movies. Whereas no one, ever, could bear to see an animal neglected. Except Brett.

  She pondered the phrase “old hat” for a while, letting etymology distract her from an uncomfortable feeling of annoyance at Brett, which rhymes with pet, she concluded finally, in illogical triumph.

  “Old hat,” she said, letting the words roll around in her mouth.

  “I have an old hat,” Harry said.

  “Life is full of surprises,” Greta said suddenly. “Why is that always so surprising?”

  In Lotte’s dream, her mother had just brought home the beautiful brown silk dress for the dance. Her father chewed his cigar on the porch. A handsome young man appeared, his eyes blue and alive. It was Morris. He took her to the dance at the college. They danced one dance, two, a thousand dances. No one was allowed to cut in. It was just Lotte and Morris. He was as good a dancer as she was. Around and around they went. She was dizzy. And in love.

  It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. It was real. It had happened sixty years ago. It had happened while she slept last night. They had never been apart after they’d been married. He had died on a trip they took together to Arizona, that hideous gray desert. And now she should go to Japan? The last trip with Morris was her last trip, period. She liked to humor Kougi, he was so polite, so gentlemanly, but why would she want to travel without Morris? And pay for a hotel? She already paid rent! No, Lotte was not one to travel anymore, foreigners being what they were, all of them so very foreign, and the food salty and vile.

  seven

  EXT. FABULOUS RANCH—NIGHT

  Wolf leads Barbie by the hand toward a beautifully landscaped pool, showing her the property. He opens his arms, as if to encompass the whole fabulous ranch.

  WOLF

  Like it?

  BARBIE

  I like it.

  He pulls her, suddenly, against him . . .