She Is Me

by Cathleen Schine

  “Brett, I’m so sorry,” she said, leaning against his chest. “I love you so much.”

  He kissed her, a little surprised by her attention. She walked, pressed against his side. She was in the hall. She heard her father whistling, making the dog sing. The cantor was laughing. The cantor was saying, “He’ll have my job!” She heard her brother through the closed door of his room. He was crying. She was walking down the hall, Brett’s hand in hers, hers in his.

  She saw Tim walking toward them, a big, happy smile on his face. She saw him see her hand in Brett’s hand.

  “Hey, Tim,” she said quickly, but what she saw was in the slow motion of panic, the paralyzed slow motion of a car crash, the oncoming car, the helpless consciousness of the oncoming car, the oncoming car hurtling forward in slow, slow, suspended motion.

  “Hey,” Tim said, looking at the floor.

  Brett did not notice the car wreck. He slapped Tim on the back and went back to bartending. Elizabeth led Tim out to the pool, taking the dog with her on his leash. Tim stood there, his hands dangling at his sides. He seemed to be growing a goatee. Greta’s fat white cat walked across the grass. Temple growled and barked at the cat and strained at his leash. The cat turned toward him, blinked, and walked on.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Elizabeth said.

  “Leave the dog home when you come here.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Tim put his hands on top of his head. It was an odd gesture, as if he were surrendering to the Japanese at Bataan. “What?” he said. His voice was slow. As if he were slow. “What?”

  She had hooked herself, like a fish, and she felt herself dangling helplessly. She had to get loose. Off the hook, she thought. That’s what “off the hook” means. I never realized that before . . .

  He leaned against the wall. “I know you’re sad about your grandmother . . . I’m really sorry.”

  She nodded.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Right.” She turned to go back inside.

  Tim grabbed her by both arms. “I know it was just meaningless sex, but . . .” His face grew confused and angry. “You’re not supposed to dump me,” he said. “I was planning to dump you. Well, let you down easy, anyway . . .”

  Behind Tim, Elizabeth was staring in the open window, face-to-face, at Brett.

  “But, I mean, the window of opportunity was pretty fucking minute . . .” Tim was saying.

  Brett had been emptying ice into an ice bucket. He stared back at her, still holding the bag as ice cubes fell into the silver bucket, overflowing, littering the counter.

  “I didn’t want to be a total cad, for Christ’s sake . . .” Tim continued.

  Elizabeth heard only the rattle of the ice cubes. She saw Brett’s face go from pale to white. From pale to white to a wavering milky sheen, which was the glare behind her own eyes. In slow motion, she stood, absolutely still.

  “Elizabeth,” she thought she heard Brett say. “You thorough little bitch.”

  Elizabeth woke up in the wrong bed. It was wrong in so many ways. It was not her own bed, the one she shared with Brett. Nor was it the pullout couch in the guest room that was called “Elizabeth’s room” at her parents’ house. In fact the only thing familiar about the bed was Temple, who had curled himself into the curve of her belly.

  This is the wrong bed, Elizabeth thought. Everything is wrong. I have no bed. I’ve made my bed and now I must lie in it. Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. She had lain down with Tim and woken up without Brett.

  When she stood outside with Tim and Temple and saw Brett, framed by the window, glaring at her, ice cubes clattering onto the counter, the sound as jarring as the score of a bad horror movie, Elizabeth had seen her life glaring, clattering, melting, turning, and walking away.

  The strange bed, the wrong bed, was Grandma Lotte’s bed. The deathbed.

  “The deathbed will be comforting,” she had said after Brett scooped up Harry and left, wordlessly, without her. Josh drove her to Lotte’s strangely hollow apartment. She wondered if he thought she was insane, for insisting on sleeping in her grandmother’s bed like a Hindu widow consigning herself to the flames of the funeral pyre. Probably not. He slept on Grandma’s couch.

  “It will be comforting,” he’d said.

  “I miss Grandma Lotte,” Josh said, coming into the bedroom in the middle of the night. His clothes were rumpled, his face creased. Crying had left him red eyed, red nosed. Elizabeth hoped he had used a sheet and pillowcase to sleep on Grandma Lotte’s couch. Lotte was so proud of that fabric.

  “Silk,” she said out loud, as her grandmother would have. “Hand painted.”

  Josh smiled and added, “Deluxe, deluxe, deluxe.”

  Greta knew something had happened to Elizabeth the night the cantor came and sang so beautifully for Lotte. She asked Elizabeth about it, but, as she expected, Elizabeth shrugged her off.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was upset about Grandma.”

  “There’s nothing you want to talk about?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “Why? Is there something you want to talk about?”

  “No,” Greta said.

  They sat there, in Lotte’s apartment, going through Lotte’s papers. They sat beside each other, both of them having something to say, neither of them saying it. Funny how that was. She and Elizabeth. They talked about everything. Except those things they didn’t talk about.

  Looking down at her mother’s shaky handwriting, Greta wanted to kiss the check stubs, to hold them to her face and tell them she loved them, loved the ballpoint scratches, the wavering traces of Lotte Levinson Franke.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. She stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry.” She walked out, got in her car, and drove home.

  Greta left the emptying of the apartment to the children. It was, simply, too painful. She avoided the children. She thought of her mother lying in her coffin. She thought of her mother lying in her bed. She thought of her as she had seen her last, when she was dead, and as she had seen her as a child, when she’d thought she was dead. She thought of Lotte when Lotte was preening and when Lotte criticized her. She imagined Lotte’s big feet. Lotte’s big feet would turn to dust. She barely spoke to Tony. She never answered the phone. She dodged everyone, even Daisy. Especially Daisy.

  Months went by. When Greta’s last chemotherapy session came around, it was Tony who took her. He read an old National Geographic in the waiting room while she went in for the drip.

  “I think all National Geographics are old,” he said in the car on the way home. “I think they come that way.”

  After dinner, Greta asked him to come into the garden with her. She needed air. She leaned on him.

  “When you’re up to it, we’ll celebrate,” he said, helping her into a chair on the terrace. But he sounded wary. He looked away from her.

  And then she told him. Just told him. She couldn’t see his face. But she could feel the air go out of him. She could feel him deflate. “I knew it,” he said. “Of course I knew it.” He knew it, but he didn’t believe it. He explained to her that she was angry about having cancer. He explained that it was natural. He understood that she was acting out. He understood that it was a phase. It was his fault. She wanted his attention. She deserved his attention. He explained. He understood.

  “But you can’t explain it away,” she said. “And you don’t understand.”

  If only she could have given him that, she thought. If only she could have left him with the illusion that he understood. But how could he understand? She didn’t understand. What she was doing, what she was feeling, was absurd, on the face of it. And what did it have, besides a face, to those outside?

  They went inside. They raised their voices. They sat silently on the couch in the living room. They said the same things, back and forth. They screamed at each other and spoke in sentences that trailed off in hopeless whispers. They did this all night.

  “I’m sorry,” Gret
a said, over and over. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. She said it so many times. She said it too many times. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’m sorry.” It stopped meaning anything. “I’m sorry.” Stopped meaning anything at all.

  “You’re a fool,” Tony said. “You’re a fucking fool.”

  He stood up so violently that his chair skidded backward and hit the wall. For one moment, Greta thought he might strike her, but he just turned and walked out. She heard the engine of his car. He was gone for three days.

  Elizabeth sat with her feet in the pool. Josh sat beside her, lifting one foot, then the other, staring at the circles the droplets made.

  “I was right,” she said.

  “Congratulations.”

  Their parents had just taken them aside for the “talk,” the one so many of their friends had described so many years ago. Elizabeth and Josh had sat on the couch like two children. They had cried like two children.

  “It’s sickening for her to be happy when he isn’t,” Elizabeth said. “Poor Daddy.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  Elizabeth put her hand in the water, then held it against her flushed face.

  “But I don’t want her to be un-happy,” Josh said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. She breathed in the clean, antiseptic smell of chlorine. “Well, maybe a little.”

  Aunt Rose and Uncle Leonard were the first in line, but that was only to be expected. They specialized in events. Funerals, weddings, a nice bris, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs . . . They knew the ropes.

  “I’m so glad you could get here,” Elizabeth said.

  “You remember your Uncle Leonard’s sister? Lillian? Her cousin passed yesterday. We’ll miss the service,” Rose said. Leonard shook his head sadly. Rose looked Elizabeth straight in the eye, as if it were Elizabeth’s fault. Missing the funeral. The death itself.

  “And how old are you, young man?” asked the next in line, a tall bony woman with a red face. She squatted, her knees protruding awkwardly from her skirt, and still she towered over Harry. In a funny broad accent that was not quite an English accent, she said, “Four, is it?” She made a clucking noise. “A big boykie, hey?” She stood up and offered Elizabeth her large hand. “It’s a new world, a new world,” she said, and moved on.

  Politely, Elizabeth said, “Yes it is.”

  For it was a new world.

  “We’re married,” she whispered to Brett, beside her in the receiving line, handsome in a blue suit and white shirt and the new silver tie Tony had given him for this day.

  “That explains all these peculiar people,” he said.

  But what explains this marriage? Elizabeth thought.

  “I don’t know what to think about you,” Brett had said when Elizabeth arrived home the morning after Grandma Lotte’s funeral. “I don’t know what to think about you anymore.”

  Elizabeth didn’t know, either.

  “I don’t know what to think about anything,” she said. “Except that you and I belong together.”

  “Tell that to Elizabeth,” Brett said to Elizabeth.

  They slept in separate rooms for months, barely speaking. Elizabeth heard the eerie bagpipe sounds late at night, and on one of those nights, she tried to open the door to his room and found it was locked.

  “You realize that Charles Bovary is the hero?” Elizabeth said to Daisy, with whom she was forced to continue working.

  “I can see how you might think so,” Daisy said.

  “I can see how you might not.”

  Elizabeth had spent months explaining it all to Brett: They had not been married, therefore she could not have committed adultery, unlike poor Madame Bovary, who had been married and could.

  “You’re insane, and your insanity is self-serving, which suggests you’re not insane at all,” Brett had replied. “You are low.” He spoke gravely, severely, for he was both hurt and deeply, profoundly offended. “You can’t be so high-handed with people you love,” he said. “Can’t you see that?”

  “Adultery . . .” she began, but he slammed his fist on the table.

  “Adultery is something you taught in a class,” he said. “This is my life. And yours. And Harry’s, too. You want a word? Unfaithful. An adjective. It describes a person who other people had faith in. A person who broke that faith, trampled it underfoot, who spit on it . . .”

  Elizabeth cried, but Brett paid no attention to her tears anymore.

  Once, he threw a chair across the room and, dark with rage, yelled, “It’s not acceptable!”

  Elizabeth, both frightened and noting what an odd schoolmarmish choice of words he’d made in his fury, looked at the overturned chair.

  “But that’s what I’m trying to explain,” she said. “If we’d been married, what I did would have been adultery.”

  He stared at her. “One of us has to move out. I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t stand you.”

  “If we had been married, what I did would have been wrong,” she continued.

  “It was wrong, damnit!”

  “And that’s why people get married.”

  Brett left the room.

  “You get married so that you will be like Madame Bovary,” Elizabeth called after him. “If in fact you are like Madame Bovary.”

  No answer.

  “I thought that’s why people shouldn’t get married,” she yelled.

  Still no answer.

  “But I was wrong,” she yelled to the silent house.

  I was wrong, she said to herself that night. She put Harry to bed and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and cried and said, out loud, “I was wrong.” But it was only when she stepped into the shower and stood, naked and shivering, and heard the faint wail of bagpipes piercing the din of the water, that the sickening plunge of comprehension hit. She had done something wrong. She had hurt people she loved. She could not undo what she had done. She was a fool.

  Elizabeth and her father danced the first dance.

  “Is Mommy going to dance with Daisy?” Elizabeth said.

  “Worried she’ll scare the horses?”

  “Yes.”

  It was embarrassing, having a mother and a mother’s girlfriend at one’s wedding. No one could convince her it wasn’t. No one had tried. But even if they had . . .

  Brett danced with Greta. Greta thought what a good dancer he was.

  “My mother would have loved this wedding,” she said. “Most of it.”

  Elizabeth had been wrong, she was a fool, she knew it, and she made sure Brett knew that she knew it. At first, he merely agreed with her.

  “Yes,” he said, coldly. “You were wrong. You hurt people you love. You threw your life away. You’re a fool.”

  On his birthday, Elizabeth had talked him into letting her take him out to dinner. They went to Chadwick’s in Beverly Hills and drank wine and ate their salads in companionable silence. Elizabeth could almost forget they were estranged and wondered if maybe, just for a moment, Brett could, too. Then, she saw an elegant, heavily made-up older woman at a table in the corner.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s Madame Bovary.”

  Brett had looked up from his plate, and his face, so relaxed just a moment before, turned hard and cold and angry. He looked at Jennifer Jones, looked at Elizabeth, shook his head with disgust, stood up, and walked out.

  But perhaps Brett was a fool, too. Or had it been that he really did love her and she really did love him and the rest was an evil memory to be exorcised every minute of every day they had left together? For neither Elizabeth nor Brett moved out of the bungalow in Venice, and gradually, almost without either of them realizing it, they stopped their frigid, discordant discussion of adultery and began talking, again, of marriage.

  “I didn’t want anything to end,” she said one evening when Harry was asleep and she and Brett sat on the couch finishing the wine. “I think I thought if we got married, something would have to end. I don’t even know what.”

  He laughed and tapped
her forehead. “And now?” he said. “What do you think you think now?”

  “I love you. I want to marry you. No end in sight.”

  And Brett had smiled and kissed her and repeated her words back to her.

  Tony whirled Greta across the floor in a waltz. The room spun. She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. The familiar scent of three decades of marriage washed over her. She remembered their wedding. They had grinned until their mouths ached. Her parents had danced, just as she and Tony did now. We’ve been friends a long time, she thought, but hesitated saying it. Tony might take it the wrong way.

  “I’ve known you a long time,” he said.

  She laughed. “I was just thinking that.”

  “I’ve known you long enough to know what you’re thinking,” he said, and they both lapsed into a sober silence.

  Harry stood in front of the band and pretended to tap dance. Elizabeth watched her mother and father. She had decided to make Tony a project of hers when her parents split up, but he seemed to prefer to take care of himself. He spent all his time working or working out, dated his massage therapist for a while, then began seeing a cardiologist he seemed to like, although Elizabeth had never met her.

  “My Blushing Bride,” he said, coming over, kissing her forehead.

  Elizabeth noticed her mother watching him walk off. She had an expression of gentle fondness Elizabeth could not remember seeing when her parents were still married.

  “I hope your marriage is as happy as mine was and lasts twice as long,” Greta said to her.

  Sixty years? Elizabeth thought, watching Brett dance with Daisy. Good God.

  “That’s a long time,” she said. She put her arms around her mother. “You were happy?” she asked. It was suddenly important to know, to hear it. “Really?”

  “Very.”

  “So why . . .”

  “Come on, Elizabeth,” Greta said, laughing. “Not today, honey.”

  Greta kissed her, then wiped lipstick off Elizabeth’s cheek with her thumb.