“That Christina Ammammabad, though,” she said. “She always looks good.”
She turned up the collar of her pajama top.
“See?” she said. “That’s style.”
“Why don’t I give you a pedicure?” Elizabeth asked, as if, again, she’d listened to Lotte’s thoughts.
Lotte heard the emery board.
“Did you ever do anything you were really sorry for? But you just kept doing it?” Elizabeth said.
“Who knows? Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling,” Lotte said. “Life kicks you in the balls, Elizabeth. Always remember that!”
“Great.”
“Your Grandma Lotte told you that.”
“Thanks.”
“So you have to kick back.”
Elizabeth moved to the other foot. The nails on the foot she had finished were a little too short. Lotte could feel it, but she said nothing. She didn’t want to hurt Elizabeth’s feelings. The girl did her best, poor thing.
“Your Grandma Lotte,” Lotte said. “On her deathbed.”
Where the hell had that come from? As the words escaped her mouth, she gasped and began to weep. She had frightened herself. Now, Lotte, shut up, you silly old crow!
“I don’t want another operation,” she wailed.
“I know.” Elizabeth came to the head of the bed and held her hand.
“But I want to get better,” Lotte said. She heard herself whimper pitifully. Well, she was entitled. If they didn’t like her whimpering, they could drop dead. She was a very sick woman.
“The surgery won’t cure me, will it?” she asked.
She waved Elizabeth back to the toe she was painting. Such a beautiful color. Silver. Not garish, though. Subtle.
“Not really,” Elizabeth said, softly, obviously embarrassed. “Just slow the tumor down.”
Lotte was grateful everyone referred to the cancer as the tumor. Cancer, that bastard, it should choke.
“I’m not ready,” Lotte said. She began to cry again. She began to wail again. “That dirty rotten bitch of a doctor, to cut me up for no reason, he can’t pull the wool over my eyes, thinks I’m a hillbilly from the sticks? Well, he’s got another thought coming! All they want is money, in their big Mercedes, they can all drop dead.”
Elizabeth hugged her and soothed her and dried her eyes and her oozing face with a tissue.
“Your grandmother’s a pistol!” Lotte said.
She watched Elizabeth smile, then give in to an involuntary snort of laughter.
There was no operation. Lotte did not go back into the hospital. Just morphine and some home-hospice visitors who tried to talk to her frankly and solicitously about death.
“Death? It should drop dead,” Lotte said, ungraciously.
Elizabeth spent more and more time with her, often bringing her laptop and working in the stuffy apartment. She saw very little of her own mother. I need to be with Grandma, she told herself. And that was true. But Elizabeth could not face her mother. That was also true.
Greta visited Lotte, too. On those weekends when Kougi was off and they were unable to get someone else, she stayed overnight. Lotte lay in bed with her eyes closed most of the day and all night. Greta forced her to walk in the hallway sometimes. She forced her to put on a clean nightgown. And Greta cleansed the tumor, wiping away the thick yellow scum. She inhaled the sickening smell and marveled that she was able to do it. She loved her mother and wondered if what she saw before her was possible, if her mother, so large a presence, cursing and exalting, could be this quiet lady rotting beneath Greta’s hand in its latex glove. Then she massaged Lotte’s big hands with lotion. Then she called Daisy and arranged to meet her for a few hours on her way home from the sickbed.
“Is it true that I never complain?” Greta asked Daisy.
“Pretty true.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. What a burden on other people, to have to guess, anticipate her needs. How considerate of her mother, who had complained day and night.
In January, Elizabeth brought two new sweaters to show her grandmother. Lotte, barely able to make a sound, waved her heavy arm and big hand at the blue one. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger.
Then she pointed at the brown sweater and whispered something hoarse and indistinct. She waved at the sweater, indicating disgust.
That night she died. The tumor, oozing and stinking as vigorously as the doctor had promised, had been newly cleaned and swabbed with ointments. The pillows were smoothed and piled up. Lotte pointed at the light. She wanted it put out. Kougi held one of her hands. Elizabeth the other. Elizabeth listened to her labored breaths. When she stopped breathing, Elizabeth thought, She’s stopped breathing. It took a moment to realize that meant her grandmother was dead. She had wondered earlier if her grandmother’s hand would become cold when she died. But now she didn’t notice. She noticed only the silence.
When the ambulance came, she watched them carry Lotte out and thought, There will be a funeral. There are arrangements to be made. I will have to make them. What would Grandma want to wear? A shroud? Her navy-blue jacket from Victoria’s Secret?
When Greta and Tony and Josh arrived, Greta put her arms around Elizabeth and they cried. Daisy, Greta thought, irrelevantly, as she held Elizabeth and breathed in the fragrance of her daughter’s moisturizer and the substance of her mother’s death.
Greta knew what Lotte wanted to be buried in. A plain white shroud. “My clothes should go to you girls,” Lotte had said once, before it was clear that she was really going to die, before the words meant anything much. “You have to amortize my investment.”
And there would be no funeral. Lotte hated funerals. Anyway, all her friends were dead.
“Mommy, we have to do something,” Elizabeth said. They were gathered at Greta and Tony’s.
Greta heard only the word “mommy.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just a few people over to the house, okay?”
Greta looked at her blankly.
Elizabeth turned to her father for help, but he was staring at Greta with an expression of despair so obvious it frightened Elizabeth and she lifted up the dog and took him outside. The dog ran through Greta’s lavender bushes and came back smelling like a sachet. Elizabeth wanted to bury her face in his fragrant coat. But he growled at her and she did not dare.
Greta went into the bedroom and sat on the floor, her back leaning against the wall, just as she had the day she realized she was in love with Daisy, the day she’d gotten Daisy’s letter.
The letter had said only, “Thank you so much for this incredible book! Yours, Daisy.”
Looking at the word “yours,” Greta had known. An innocent note. And Greta had known.
Thank God my poor mother never had to witness this, she thought, gesturing, as if her betrayal of Tony, the end of her marriage, her passion for another woman, were all displayed on her bedside table.
Harry knocked on the door.
He came in and sat on her lap, leaning his head all the way back, peering up at the ceiling.
“What are you looking at?” Greta asked.
“Nothing,” Harry said. “There’s nothing there, Grandma.”
On the walk street, sprinklers had darkened the cement path with water. Roots pressed the pavement up from below. Flowering vines reached out from the fences. Roses hung down over closed gates. Temple ran ahead, the two toes missing from his back foot causing him to tip awkwardly to one side, and then back again. His tail, as long as his low body, wagged hysterically. He darted from fence to fence, gate to gate, his nose scraping the ground. At every new address, he barked. He growled. His hackles stood up like plates on a dinosaur. Ferocious snouts poked out from beneath each fence. Dogs crashed at their gates, howling with frustration.
Elizabeth and Temple made it to the cross street. Temple defecated in his usual spot. He lifted his leg against the soft bark of the malaluca tree. He barked and growled at a puppy on a l
eash across the street. Elizabeth gave the owner, a fit middle-aged woman in exercise clothes, a wan, apologetic smile. A child rode by on a bike. Temple lunged before Elizabeth could pull up on his leash. The little girl on her bicycle wobbled but did not fall. With a blue plastic bag that had held the New York Times that morning, Elizabeth scooped up the neat coil of dog shit and walked back to her house.
ten
The gathering for Grandma Lotte was an elegant affair. And it was Daisy who ended up planning it. A friend of hers was a caterer and provided a tasteful spread of tiny sandwiches and tiny pastries. Tray after tray appeared on the big dining-room table. The cantor from Daisy’s synagogue sang a prayer.
“You have such a beautiful voice,” Greta said to him afterward. “I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have objected to you at all.”
Elizabeth watched Brett offer people drinks. He opened bottles of wine. He even made martinis. Did he think this was a party? She noted how harsh and unkind toward Brett she’d become. Harry sat on the floor playing with a dump truck. She wondered if he would remember Grandma Lotte as he grew up. Daisy spoke softly to the girl serving canapés who then gathered up several dirty glasses. Daisy eyed the plates, the forks, the napkins. She checked the ice. She caught the eye of a young man with a tray of full wineglasses, made a slight movement with her chin, and the waiter moved quickly to another part of the room where a group of Elizabeth’s parents’ oldest friends were standing, drinkless.
Amazing, Elizabeth thought. She is directing the shivah. Perhaps Kougi would begin reciting haiku. Josh and Greta could discuss the landscaping and geologic qualities of the grave site. Tony could comfort the Grieving Relatives. Tim could describe the journey of the atom from the big bang to tapping toes on a vaudeville stage to the cold feet of the body lowered into the dark burial pit. Laurie might show up any minute with a French provincial coffin she found on La Brea.
Everyone in character. But what about me? Elizabeth tried to imagine what would be in character for her. She could see herself only as she was—bewildered and unhappy.
“Eat,” said a voice beside her. It was Volfmann. “Here.” He handed her a small sandwich.
She ate it, surprised at how hungry she was, surprised by his presence.
“You’re here,” she said. “You’re incredibly kind. Sometimes.”
“So I’ve been told. Sometimes.” He put his hands in his pockets. “She lived a long time,” he said. “But what kind of crappy consolation is that?”
Elizabeth nodded, grateful that he understood. She drank a glass of wine he handed her, then another.
“You’re always getting me drunk,” she said.
“Somebody has to.”
In the kitchen, Greta stood in the chill from the open refrigerator. I’m an orphan, she thought. A fifty-three-year-old orphan. She laughed. But she felt like an orphan. A small, helpless orphan.
Now that Greta was an orphan, she saw that it made things easier for Tony. He had been angry at her before Lotte died. You’re so distant, he had said. She had laughed. Me? she said. That’s your line. But he was right, she had been distant. She had been far, far away. She had been lost. He could feel it. You can’t live with someone for more than thirty years and not notice they have disappeared. No matter how much you work at it.
Now, though, he was exceptionally considerate. He was helpful. He was full of love. Greta saw that he loved her, and she was grateful. She saw that she loved him back. But nobody loves you like your mama do, Tony. Or was it that you love nobody like you do your mama?
Over the course of the evening, Greta passed by Daisy again and again, the back of her hand brushing Daisy’s hip, her elbow grazing Daisy’s bare arm, her shoulder pressed against Daisy’s shoulder for an instant, a shudder of recognition and memory and promise. She watched herself from the distance of her grief, horrified.
“I was to take her to Japan,” Kougi said, taking Greta’s hands in his, leading her away from the refrigerator. “Miss Lotte in Japan.”
Sounds like a dime novel about a call girl, Greta thought. She enjoyed the feeling of his cool, smooth hands cupped around her own.
“She was lucky to have you to take care of her,” Greta said. “I was lucky to have you to take care of her, too.”
She walked quickly from the room, afraid she would throw herself on Kougi and sob on his shoulder, calling out her misery for all to hear.
Greta saw her daughter across the room, pale and puffy-eyed from crying. She came up beside Elizabeth and put her hand on the small of her back. They stood quietly like that for a few minutes. She watched Brett mixing a drink at the other side of the room and wondered if all was well between him and Elizabeth. They seemed so far apart. But the distance of a room was not really distance. Death was distance. Greta should have been with her mother when she died. She should have been holding her hand, placing a cool cloth on her forehead, offering her a small, jewellike chip of ice to suck on. She shuddered.
“Are you okay?” Elizabeth said.
Greta shrugged. “Are you?”
Am I? Elizabeth wondered. She turned her face to her mother’s in order to reassure Greta that she was, indeed, okay, because whether she was okay or not, her mother had cancer and so needed to think she was okay.
She opened her mouth to say, “Status quo.” She closed her mouth without saying anything. Her mother was no longer listening. She saw Greta’s face, noted her flushed cheeks, her eyes wide and intense, her breath soft but uneven, jagged. Greta was smiling oddly.
Why are you smiling? Elizabeth thought. What the hell are you smiling at?
Elizabeth saw that Greta was smiling in the direction of a half-dozen half-remembered faces of graying doctors and their blond wives. She was smiling past the doctors, past the doctors’ wives. She was smiling at a distant shimmer of fiery, unmistakable tenderness. It was a face. It was Daisy’s face. Greta was smiling oddly, her breath jagged, her face flushed, her eyes glazed, at Daisy.
The distance of a room is no distance at all, Greta thought.
Elizabeth looked at her mother’s hand, which was now entwined in her own. She looked at the tourmaline ring.
“Where’s your wedding band?” she said.
Greta looked at her with an expression Elizabeth had never seen before, a combination of horror and defiance. “It doesn’t fit,” she said. “Anymore.”
Elizabeth sat on the bed in her parents’ room. They slept in this bed. Together. They were her parents, her mother and her father. Whatever their secrets, they were still that. They were still married. They still slept here, in this vast king-size bed.
“What are you doing, my poor little duck?” Brett said. “All alone in the dark?” He came in and sat beside her on the bed.
Thank you for calling me a poor little duck, Elizabeth thought. It made her feel safe, it made her remember how she felt when she felt close to Brett. His poor little duck. She felt the soft, pressed cotton of his shirtsleeve against her arm.
“My . . .” she said. She stopped. “Something is going on with my mother.”
“No shit.” He gestured toward the living room, where the mourners were still gathered.
Elizabeth thought of the small, crooked, lustful smile. A tourmaline ring. A blushing cheek. Two fingers touching beneath the water as if the pool were the Sistine Chapel, as if they were God and Adam.
“My poor father,” Elizabeth said.
“Mommy?”
It was Harry. For some reason he was crawling. He crouched on all fours in the doorway.
Elizabeth went to him and sat on the floor, gathering him up in her arms.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Everything is okay.”
Greta appeared, looming above them.
“Come on, Harry, pussycat, I’ll read to you,” she said.
Elizabeth did not look up. Pussycat. She held Harry tighter.
“Mommy!” he said, squeezing himself out of her grip and toddling off with his grandmother.
Elizabeth couldn’t speak. She could only stare at her mother’s back and think, This can’t really be happening, as if she were in a trashy horror movie. I am in a trashy horror movie, Mom, she thought. Did you ever think of that? Hey, you, Mom, did you ever think of anything? Like your husband, for instance? Did you ever think of the family you have to think of? Your grandchild? Your son and your daughter? Did you ever think of thinking of England?
Brett sat on the floor and put his hand out for hers. Elizabeth clung to his hand. He was the only one in all the world she could talk to about this, and she couldn’t talk to him. It all seemed so unlikely. Her mother who barely had the energy or the appetite to drink a cup of tea. Now we know what’s been tiring her out, Elizabeth thought, surprised at her vulgarity. It was, after all, her own mother. Her mother to whom she was so close. How could her mother be having an affair without Elizabeth knowing? With a woman no less? Her mother, with whom she had joined forces to present a united front to lie to Grandma Lotte, had lied to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth leaned into Brett, into his familiar embrace, the sharp crease of his collar, the flat perfume of starch.
More than thirty years of marriage, a farce.
“I had it all wrong,” she said. “It isn’t adultery that’s tragedy or farce. It’s marriage.”
“Shut up with that shit, Elizabeth,” he said. He released her and stood up. In the doorway, backlit by the bright hallway, Brett appeared enormous, far away, unavoidable yet subtle, the peak of a misty mountain. He held out his hand to help her up. She had been so unfair to him, yet there he was. That was how her father was supposed to appear to Greta. How could her mother not see that Tony was bound to her forever? How could Greta have struggled free of the bond of matrimony? How could Elizabeth have struggled free of the bond of love?
She Is Me Page 23